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STOP THIEF 



BY 

COL. V. M. MASTEN 




BOSTON 
RICHARD G. BADGER 

THE GOEHAM PRESS 



Copyright, 1921, by Richard G. Badger 



All Rights Reserved 



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Made in the United States of America 



The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 

SEP 12 '21 

§)C\.A62429l 



INTRODUCTION 

During the last three decades, members of the so- 
called "Spiritualistic School" have governed in Amer- 
ica in the matter of reform edict. They have done it 
as if they had seen from the peak of prescience. Not- 
withstanding, the era of their influence is the black- 
est for crime in the country's history. The homicidal 
criminal assays human life at less this day than the 
primitive savage did. The blood-spilling brute is as 
the barometer of crime, and the deduction is distinct. 

Since crime is cosmic, and the criminal nearly as 
varied as criminousness, such ominously-raw reading 
of the social sign can be charged up only in con- 
tributory measure against any cult or credo; but, 
the school in question can not shunt the burden of 
proof for assumption of wisdom greater than Al- 
mighty God's, expressed in slogan to the effect that 
repression of the predal felon is nugatory when it 
is not baneful, and for reformative regimes based on 
that assumption. 

Firstly, that is exactly as it would be framed by 
human hyenas who break for money-bags across sun- 
flooded thoroughfares. Secondly, were it sound ethi- 



4 Introduction 

cally, it would well-nigh strip the Christian religion 
of carrying power. 

"Thou shalt not" is the enacting clause of the 
Decalogue, to which sentient man is held to bald 
choice of adjustment, or to pay the penal price. 
From the very beginning, the Father has had to 
force His children to obey Him. 

In any case, it has been demonstrated that meth- 
ods won't do which motivate further regression of 
the habitual lawbreaker, while they leave him in con- 
tempt for precepts fundamentally at variance with 
his exactions; albeit he would be as dense as he is 
wrongly rated, did he not second fulsomely with lip 
service, men and measures that speed him from courts 
and correctional plants to renewed guerrilla war- 
fare on society. 

Had Americans nipped just that one, ulterior de- 
sign in the bud, they would not now be taxed in the 
ratio of dime to cent for the upkeep of confirmed 
criminal rounders ; nor would constantly mounting 
death blows be delivered with sneering disdain of 
consequences ; nor would associated pressure be bla- 
tantly exerted in council chambers, where hyphenated 
tricksters seek to read the meaning out of the plain 
lettering of the Constitution, in favor of crass anti- 
social plunderers. 

Whatever the specific degree of responsibility, 
Americans must waken to the fact that the broad 



Introduction 5 

question of crime is the cardinal problem before them 
for solution; also, they must react quickly to the 
truth that the state of mind which caused Cain to 
kill Abel, is precisely the state of mind which impels 
predatory criminals to tax liberty and tear things. 

In pursuit of such a theme, one may be excused 
deviation from the customary wording of the intro- 
duction, if so to deviate is to sharpen the mind of 
the reader for the matter of the context. Hence, we 
have thought wise to place certain of general con- 
clusions here: 

Catholic analysis of the grand ratios of crime is 
impossible. It is not within the ken of man to trace 
all of human action to ultimate impulse. The cap- 
ital motive for a given crime commonly lies locked 
in the criminal's breast. Bits of bait which obsessed 
the mind of the murderer and decided his offense 
often escape investigators whose minds are gripped 
by counter motives. Conversely, the prober has been 
known to glare at surface circumstance, while blind 
to congenital cracks in character. 

Fortunate it is, therefore, that the main impulse 
to murder is usually easier to trace than is the mur- 
derer's weapon. The edict of the clan, issued to fur- 
ther pursuit of unlawful spoil, impels the gangster 
to kill. Given a crime of the unspeakable variety, 
the orders go out to round up the tramps, since 
many hobos are confirmed sexual perverts who value 



6 Introduction 

human life in pennyworths. Sexual mania running 
to degenerate curiosity, carrying a dash of race 
hatred, usually incites the negro in like cases. So 
the act trails to the motive, from depth of design to 
height of folly, such as drives the primitive in neigh- 
bors to exchange deadly blows over the ownership 
of a lineal foot of earth. 

Objective factors of crime in America induce acts 
of the gravest kind. Example : A murderer has three 
chances to one in his favor against being brought to 
trial, ten to one against life imprisonment, and eighty 
to one to escape the death penalty. It is but in natu- 
ral sequence that more peace-time murders are com- 
mitted annually in the United States than in any 
other five civilized nations. 

Such humiliating comparison tells plainly that de- 
terrent measures do deter. They deter if they are 
binding, as in the days of "good King Alfred," when 
"you might have hung garlands of jewels and pre- 
cious stones across the streets of London, and no 
man would have touched them." True, Americans do 
not take kindly to hanging a thief. But imagine 
"garlands of jewels and precious stones" hung across 
a thoroughfare of America's metropolis, where the 
police authorities caution day wayfarers to arm 
against blood-letting bandits. 

Visible signs may well mislead, yet they seem to 
indicate that the alloy in the American blend of race 



Introduction 7 

now fusing strikes through from the depths mainly 
as follows: 

(1) Waning reverence for sacred things; not 
irreverence for mummery rooted in man-made tradi- 
tion, but flippant flouting of fundamental injunc- 
tions. Therefore persistent catch-as-catch-can tac- 
tics employed to make of God's own day a gala day. 

(2) Constantly increasing homicidal pressure re- 
sulting from the ever cheapening price put upon the 
taking of human life: sign reminiscent of a cardinal 
cause for the buried ruins of one-time capital na- 
tions. 

(3) The excessive toll paid to recreative activ- 
ities and amusements irrationally ordered. All of 
clean sport, and its kin, is good to the point of ton- 
ing body and mind, thereby re-creating appetite for 
worthy work. Beyond that point it does not shape 
muscle for life's use, does shunt the mind out of 
pabulum necessary for its full unfolding, and does 
usher in the insidious gaming habit with its many- 
tentacled curse. 

Centuries before the batting average was sus- 
pected, Mens sana in corpore sano haled men to 
the stadium, there to frolic, while they shaped and 
disciplined their bodies and minds for laudable pur- 
suits. Then came the gamester-parasite with his 
brute and wager; and then the Roman amphitheatre 
began the writing of hideous pages into history. T?o- 



8 Introduction 

day, many have the same pen in hand a'scribbling 
the prize ring pug into prominence, with women in 
at the death. 

What, in basic principle and brutalizing sugges- 
tion, the difference between then and now? How far 
a cry is it from the roped arena to the Roman amphi- 
theatre? How far from combat or other sport that 
kills, maims, or leaves its to-be-fatal internal mark? 

(4) Growing contempt for law, order, authority, 
and the agents thereof. That is to put it mildly, 
when red-handed young men receive capital sentences 
with a sneer or smiling sang-froid. Common lawless- 
ness would not now obtain, had we given common- 
sense support to those sworn to execute the criminal 
law agreeably with its most binding predicates. 

"If you want to get a bad law repealed, enforce 
it. 5 ' On the other hand, if you want to render good 
laws ridiculous, temporize with those who break them, 
either in or out of prison. Nature holds out no re- 
bates in the matter of obedience to edicts which the 
general law echoes. Man may not improve upon 
that by bidding for the parasital brute, and through 
him, for predatory war. 

(5) The pace set for weaklings by those who prac- 
tice financial legerdemain. Deft argument can not 
convince petty thieves of essential values, while pyr- 
amidal thieves pick the nation's pocket. 

Tell an instinctive money-shark that spurious dol- 



Introduction 9 

lars carry the germs of crime and disease, even death, 
and he will laugh at you. Nevertheless, it is true; 
so true that were it not for unclean money, sufficient 
of prohibitory law might be printed on a postal card. 
During recent decades, the cardinal causes of 
crime in America have been variable only in the shift- 
ing of emphasis. For the emphasis, public neglect 
and public indifference are markedly chargeable, as 
is indicated by these capital crime-breeding influ- 
ences : 

(a) Loose immigration laws still shot to pieces in 
the enforcement. 

(b) Crime by suggestion. 

(c) The sporting instinct run mad. 

(d) Law that has limped. 

(e) Judges who have judged not. 

(f ) Class legislation. 

(g) Public conception of the offices of penal and 
semi-penal institutions, and of the potentialities of 
the comparatively small, yet instinctively criminal, 
class of habitual felons who draw casual offenders 
with them into the maelstrom of crime. 

Other constant and diverse, yet mutually sympa- 
thetic, factors are not singled out because they are 
woven into the fabric of all nations. 

Capping all, the dream-drugged have sought and 
seek to reverse natural laws which govern formation 
and re-formation of character. 



10 Introduction 

Our people may not like it, yet may not leave it : 
they must take up the gavel for sane solution of a 
very grave problem; a problem so complex and yet 
so singular in its demands, that the layman protago- 
nist better decline the issue unless he can attack it 
with an earnest, open, trained mind, plus a God-given 
understanding of men and boys which cleaves close 
to inspiration. The onrush of crime needs must 
establish such men and mentors actively in the work, 
while it eliminates the uninformed, misinformed, and 
mercenaries who mislead. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Immigration • 15 

II Crime by Suggestion • . 45 

III Law Made to Limp — Judges who Have 

Judged Not — Class Legislation . > 82 

IV Reformative Regimes . . . . . . 120 

V Cross-Matched Correction . . . . 164 

VI The Sporting Instinct Run Mad . • 197 

VII Tempting and Tagging to Criminality 240 

VIII Constructive Recommendations . . 266 



STOP THIEF 



STOP THIEF 

CHAPTER I 

IMMIGRATION 

No one cause making for crime has left Americans 
so far apart in conclusions as has immigration. No 
figures more than immigration figures have been 
abused to point a moral or to strike an average. 
Those of negative persuasion minimize the handicaps 
accruing from the millions of non-adjusting aliens 
we have nurtured. Those of positive view contend 
that we should be immeasurably better off funda- 
mentally, had we intrusted the expansion of the coun- 
try chiefly to its natural friends. 

However history shall construe the case otherwise, 
it will probably postulate that we could not have 
refused asylum consistently at any time to a normal, 
white human bent on getting out of lumself for his 
adopted country the best expression of which he was 
capable ; also, that we should have restricted citizen- 
ship from the first to those so dyed and determined. 
So much of conclusion clings when we recall that we 
were helped generously to criminals, renegades and 
adventurers during pre-Federation days; clings the 
more tightly, because certain of such were induced 

15 



16 Stop Thief 

soon thereafter to help keep States at loggerheads 
which had grown garrulous over their grudges and 
growing pains. 

But argument concerning the merits of in-bred 
and out-bred white races must end in the clouds until 
the ethnologist can put his finger on the former and 
prove his people. In any case, the like of "Not 
proven if the accused emigrates to the Colonies," will 
not, from now on, serve a thief and thug-ridden na- 
tion. Since it has been demonstrated that no coun- 
try can safely carry the intrinsic obligations of an- 
other country, international ethics needs must exact 
of each nation that it shall corral and care for its 
own lawlessly-impelled and badly-equipped. 

To the specific assertion that we breed a mongrel 
race, the answer is that history does not disclose 
other than cross-bred white stock. Nevertheless, we 
have underestimated the limitations of the "national 
melting pot." That trite phrase does credit to a 
national heart that has sought to express cosmic 
altruism; but it is at once inexact and misleading. 
It is inexact because the "melting pot" fails to fuse 
all of its ores. It is misleading for the vital reason 
that American soil is quite the last on which foot- 
hold should be given addle-brained agitators. More 
than another the republican unit counts. Numbers 
reach their highest significance under a republican 
form of government. Where the greatest number 
knead the national dough, there the scrawney fingers 



Immigration 17 

of Chaos will be most bold to effect the seasoning; 
hence the primal duty of a democracy is to select 
for quality every individual it elects to befather. 

A blended race will inevitably express the attri- 
butes of its elements. Therefore America holds the 
world's record for physical weaklings, those mentally 
defective and deviated, and offenders of all classes 
against organic law. 

The dumping of criminals and undesirables on our 
shores has been met with partial check, albeit the 
biographical registers of our remedial plants show 
that we still fall far short thereof of safeguarding 
our national interests. Very close to sixty per cent 
of such inmates are either foreign-born of foreign 
parents, or native-born of foreign parents. Twenty- 
five per cent of imprisoned felons are foreign-born. 
A goodly number of others have father or mother 
who was foreign-born, and foreign-born grandpar- 
ents are taken for granted. 

But we shall be obliged to keep the gates ajar for 
good men, at whose ancestry it is too late to shoot. 
Further, so to shoot would be to waste much metal, 
since but certain variations as to type and typal 
expression differentiate men who sprang on the one 
hand from a not too closely in-bred stock like the 
English, and on the other hand from reasonably 
selective, if relatively out-bred stock, such as the 
American must be made if it is to endure and con- 
tend for progress. 



18 Stop Thief 

The true mongrel will issue in any event, if from 
no other cause than that otherwise level-headed men 
and women violate laws governing metabolism and 
fecundity. 

A child, for instance, conceived while the male is 
under the secondary effect of alcoholic stimulation, 
and the female under opposed mental and physical 
stress, will likely example the spineless neurotic. 
That consummation will be but likely instead of rea- 
sonably certain to endure because, while the scaven- 
gers of the blood are not infallible alchemists, they 
labor untiringly to transmute toxic matter in the 
life flow, and to restore the latter to comparative 
purity. 

Concerning human conduct, it is often impossible 
to demarcate congenital and racial pressure. The 
one usually carries the other, yet our immigration 
problem reduces less to consanguine stigmata as that 
phrase is technically employed, than it does to the 
acquired thoughts and acts of even the remote for- 
bears of present aliens ; thoughts and acts transmit- 
ted down the generations, and become instinctive and 
habitual. 

Take a case to differentiate congenital defect, and 
that which obtains mainly because of the sum of 
environment and bringing-up. We shall strike cross- 
currents, as we always do when analyzing human 
character, but consider the case: 

Until the Roman marauder had ridden rough-shod 



Immigration 19 

over Eastern Sicily, the natives of that island were 
as homogeneous as any the world had known. They 
were a sturdy, trustful folk, who gloried in their 
close communication with one another and with na- 
ture. But Sicily, "the gem of the Mediterranean," 
was a prolific granary for any one of the nomadic 
nations by which she was held as if in a vise, and 
which could plant its standards on Sicilian soil and 
maintain them there. Hence, all of the avaricious 
brute and bigot latent in man was visited in turn 
upon the island people by contiguous peoples bent 
on conquest. The Sicilian fought back as best he 
could, necessarily with the like of weapons aimed 
against him; necessarily, also, having learned too 
well new tricks of old masters at trickery, he was 
finally crushed by them with his fingers closed on 
his brother's throat, and his trust in mankind but 
a mocking memory. 

Therefore, the pen of Signor Antonio Cutrera, 
Chief of Police of Palermo, but tells of human action 
in natural sequence, when it attests the anarchistic 
character to-day of a very large percentage of Sicil- 
ians. They come honestly by instincts a blend of 
the fox and wolf. 

In connection therewith the virile fact for the 
government of the United States to ponder is, that 
while the Strait of Messina separates Sicily from the 
mainland by not so much as small-gun fire, the home 
government had, up to the inception of the late 



20 Stop Thief 

conflict, made no serious effort to stamp out anar- 
chistic graft and blackmail on the island. Probably 
Italy found plenty of pre- World War work for her 
carbineers not otherwise assigned, to confine the law- 
less machinations of her own Camorra to Naples, 
where that society picked and chose nearly at will, 
thanks to a driftmg policy, and to the denatured 
who drive devil-may-cares. 

In any event, members of the Sicilian Mafiauso, 
headquarters at Palermo, stalked abroad, practically 
unmolested, over the island, laying tribute where they 
listed, and woe unto the man who challenged them. 

"Omerta" is the particular term in the Mafia's 
code of action synonomous with honor. According 
to that code, "a man who appeals to the law against 
his fellow man is either a fool or coward; and he 
who cannot take care of himself without the protec- 
tion of the police, is both." The same code "brands 
him with infamy who wouldn't go to prison for his 
pal"; also demands of its devotee and victim of 
vendetta within the clan that he shall, with his last 
gasp, express contempt for authority in these words : 
"If I live, I will kill thee; if I die, I forgive thee." 
While the Mafia maintained a reign of terror over 
the purses and activities of those without the drawn 
circle, many of its edicts were benevolent. 

The Camorra is a straight-laced combination of 
brigandage and general criminality, interlaced with 



Immigration 21 

the "white slave 55 traffic. The latter is controlled 
actively by the gutter-bred, swaggering, chip-on-his- 
shoulder "Riccottaro," whose elbow you had better 
not brush on a Naples boulevard. Both clans exem- 
plify the last fling of ingrowing individualism per- 
verted, both bank on the subterranean offices of the 
political charlatan, and both are a standing menace 
to the happiness, prosperity, and security of the 
law-abiding 'mongst whom they dwell. 

The Sicilian anarchist's social vendetta is cited 
because his oblique motives are easiest to trace to 
their source; and because they furnish the master 
key to the reason for nearly all of lethal blows aimed 
at government by law in America. 

Thousands of Russian rustics come to us nursing 
nascent passions born of centuries of cruelty and 
misrule visited on them by Romanoff dynasties. 
Egged on to it by ruthless radicals, and amortizing 
Americans who elect to remain under cover, they ex- 
press latent hatred of governing power by which they 
had been repressed for so long. First off, they usu- 
ally bend only to force, and respect that only when 
it is crushing. 

The Hungarian peasant reaches for the harpoon 
because of his hangover of hurts inflicted by thick- 
lipped Hapsburgs. It matters not that he quickly 
comes into blessings here he could have but dreamed 
of in his native land ; like the domesticated dog-wolf, 



22 Stop Thief 

he sniffs at luxuries thrust upon him and instinctively 
breaks for rough going and a killing accompanied 
by his lobo howl of defiance calculated to terrorize. 

So on, down through the long immigration list, 
members galore of which have been swayed by re- 
active laws of doing and being, Americans have been 
at pains either to misunderstand or to hold lightly ; 
hence, instead of stitches taken in time of regula- 
tion and exclusion guaranteed by immigration laws 
sufficiently drastic and inevitably operative, they 
have drifted along under indifferent execution of 
restrictive measures never clearly thought out, al- 
ways miserably mismanaged. 

Furthermore, could and should the home govern- 
ment deport at once the last and least of "undesir- 
ables," that action would not wash the country of 
"ists" and "isms" traceable in their inception to 
alien agitators; it would not for the vital reason 
that large ideas, like large bodies, move slowly com- 
ing and coming to rest ; and picking your neighbor's 
pocket at will or bust, is a large idea become very 
firmly fixed in the minds of millions in America, — due 
largely to the mean instinct in so many humans to 
shoulder for the hog's share. 

The pity, not to say asininity, of the present, cos- 
mic muddle is, that it might have been avoided by 
Americans with the exercise of just a modicum of 
horse-sense. American lads coming up decades ago 
with alien playmates in pasture lots sensed the dan- 



Immigration 23 

ger and voiced it; sensed it that many of those 
coarse-grained comrades were struck through and 
through with more than a dash of cruelty which left 
them cold to cries of pain they wrung from lads of 
finer sensibilities subject to instinctive brutalities 
such as "giving the boot" to a fallen and conquered 
adversary; sensed it in the saloon hang-about thug, 
and pawn of the second-generation ward heeler; 
sensed it a little later on in the broader use political 
crooks made of human tools shaped and sharpened 
for political chicanery and brigandage; and sensed 
it finally and logically in the movements of the mili- 
tant mass of aliens and near-aliens for individual 
and class expression which the wording of the Consti- 
tution can not, in sane interpretation, be otherwise 
than beaten into backing, as witness : the picket line 
with its bald bid for the most far-reaching forms of 
duress, and exemption of laborites from law which 
must be equally binding upon all, else the natural 
economic balance and the commonwealth are at one 
and the same time at the mercy of grouped plun- 
derers. 

A people that remains stupidly heedless of danger 
signals plainly read by its upcoming kids, deserves 
to pay as the American people are now paying, and 
must, at best, unto several generations ahead; how 
much and in what coin from now on will depend upon 
whether they do or do not, at this crucial transi- 
tional era in their history, stand pat for citizenship 



M Stop Thief 

of the quality the forefathers labored to postulate. 
In the interim, they will do well to come to grips 
with the fact that shackling with a bare majority 
is quite another matter than unshackling with a 
seventy-five-per-cent verdict. 

In due time, natural forces will regulate prices, 
here and everywhere. Man will produce because he 
has to; but always an appreciable percentage of the 
grand total of humans won't behave unless they are 
made to behave. Having swung wide our doors of 
ingress to millions of the latter, we are now faced 
with the chore of making the best of it. The best 
of it is to select for quality in the future, in accord- 
ance with our needs. 

Our police court and prison records tell indubi- 
tably that army corps of anarchists have sieved willy- 
nilly into America. The same records also show that 
racial instincts impel hundreds of thousands of aliens 
to take on license and tear things. The anarchistic 
wheel is but the outer wheel within which related 
others revolve, and the bald issue is : Shall American 
institutions give place, and if so, to what? 

Fortune's favorites do not answer with platitudes 
hurled at "pessimism"; neither do they shrive the 
government of blame for brigades of out-and-out 
anarchists spread over the land, throtigh pointing 
to the progeny of aliens whom we number with our 
best citizens ; nor can they compare with the stanch, 
sturdy, pioneering stock from which the latter 



Immigration 25 

sprang, the low-strata Italian, Slav and like aliens, 
who are mentally and morally below grade, whose 
trend is to the lowest level of their class, and whom 
instinctive habit places and keeps at war with human 
progress as the true American senses it. Sneezing 
at lawlessness that worms to the foundation of the 
national structure will get us nowhere. 

Beyond question there has been slow poison for 
the United States by the admission of vast hordes 
of exploitable, mentally backward, physically sub- 
normal, and morally obtuse immigrants, not to men- 
tion a grand army of incorrigible agitators against 
the general law. Certain it is that we have strained 
our powers of assimilation to the point of rupture; 
and it can be argued that we thereby complicated 
international problems, and perhaps retarded the 
ultimate destiny of man. 

One of the self-evident truths which the Japanese- 
Russian War carried with emphasis is, that the viril- 
ity of a nation sums to the average quality of its 
units, the which, first of all, must express common 
and comprehensive efficiency. A few concrete exam-- 
pies suggest what would have happened in 1898 had 
we opposed a fit, militant, first-class power, such as 
Germany then was, instead of the arms of Spain. 
Comparison is made as between the then Japanese 
army and the army we sent to the Spanish-Ameri- 
can War, because those armies nearly paralleled each 
other in the matter of popular draft; whereas our 



26 Stop Thief 

draft for the World War was made strictly from 
our best. Even so, the physically disqualified reached 
within a fraction of forty per cent of the total num- 
ber summoned for examination. While considering 
the following points, keep that vital point in mind; 
also, that Japan's draft for her soldiers was then, 
as it is now, strictly popular. If a lad is not fit for 
service, Japan wisely makes him fit, if he can be made 
fit. Then consider that as between two nearly equal 
powers at war, the ultimate victory will go almost 
certainly to the one which can keep engaged with 
the greatest number of units fit to fight. 

Japan sent fifteen-hundred-thousand men, rank 
and file, to the Japanese-Russian War. Of that num- 
ber less than one-tenth of one per cent reported to 
the field hospitals for treatment for preventable dis- 
ease. The United States sent one-hundred-and-sev- 
enty-thousand men to the Spanish-American War, 
ninety per cent of whom reported to the field hos- 
pitals for treatment for preventable disease. 

Concerning the same wars, and as to the per cent 
of those who died from preventable disease compared 
with those who died from wounds received in battle, 
the toll is against us in the ratio of about fifty to 
one. 

Asked by an American officer what punishment 
Japan meted out to peace-time deserters from her 
army, a Japanese officer replied: "I can not say; I 
have never heard of a deserter from our army." 



Immigration 27 

Five hundred to the ten thousand of Uncle Sam's 
enlisted men desert yearly. Enlistment in the mili- 
tary service of Japan is compulsory, in the army 
of the United States it is voluntary. 

In the first and second instances allow for the 
then vastly superior equipment of Japan's medical 
corps in the field, plus the more adverse conditions 
of climate which our lads had to overcome; and in 
the third instance allow for lack of tradition, and 
the greater temptation for the more nervously consti- 
tuted American to break ties that bind him to an- 
other's will, and still a great gap yawns before. 

Peace-time fracture of a military oath taken by 
an unfolding, impetuous lad may be adjudged too 
seriously, though it is reliably the deteriorating, or 
the deteriorated, who desert; but ameliorating cir- 
cumstance can not alter the fact that the very life 
of a nation courses as the blood courses in the veins 
of its average citizen. There is nothing "just as 
good" as physical quality and moral stamina. The 
one usually implies the other, and both are indis- 
pensable to a human organism that will stand up 
under repeated rough usage. However exalted, patri- 
otism will else but nerve us one day for a shambles, 
— shall we continue to pump bad blood into the 
national arteries. 

They were not even such patriots, were the three^ 
months Union soldiers whose term of enlistment ex- 
pired just before the first battle of Bull Run, and 



28 Stop Thief 

who marched off that field by the thousand at the 
first belching of Beauregard's guns; nor were the 
200,000 Federals who turned their backs on the col- 
ors during the war; nor the legions of hyphenated 
Americans who made no bones about assuring the 
American people at the inception of the late crisis 
in Europe that they left their patriotic roots in the 
soil of their nativity. 

Withal, the burden of proof is clearly upon those 
who hold literacy should be made a cardinal test for 
citizenship in the United States. Without the aid of 
the nearly-illiterate we should have been in a bad 
way during the War of the Rebellion; indeed, com- 
parative illiteracy obtained then throughout our 
country, does now, and necessarily will if we are to 
get the work of the land done until the cunning of 
dynamics is further exploited. At the present time, 
only seven of one-hundred public school children 
reach high school, but five of the seven go to college, 
and many of the latter do not conclude a course of 
study there. However, crass ignorance that clings 
to foreign roots is essentially another matter. 

The national census of 1910 attests that the illit- 
erate children of aliens were then as one to three of 
the illiterate children of native-born Americans ; but 
let us not forget the ratio of foreign-born to native, 
that of the greater number of aliens we are now 
receiving at least twenty-five per cent are crassly 
illiterate while brazenly non-social, and that the 



Immigration 29 

majority of them receive such education as they 
get in an atmosphere if not un-American, or anti- 
American, then at least not calculated to inspire 
children so taught to stand for, and abide by, exactly 
that which the minds of American patriots envisage. 

Education which connotes whole-hearted loyalty 
to and reverence for the traditions entire of the 
American flag is one thing; any other is fatally 
false in basic principle, and must prove no less in 
practice, in so far as the bone and sinew of Amer- 
icanism is at stake. Shall we put up with parceling 
of patriotism, we shall go down first in parcels, and 
then in a heap. 

In his "The Old World in the New," Professor 
Edward Alsworth Ross of the University of Wiscon- 
sin commands the attention of the thinking men of 
the country with his presentation of the alien prob- 
lem. None other has given to that problem more 
profound analysis. Professor Ross holds bluntly in 
substance that they live in a fool's paradise who 
imagine the assimilation of the immigrant proceeds 
free of anti-American influences. He makes his brief 
carry, as witness in part: 

"To bring about segregation of children into par- 
ish schools the public schools are denounced from 
the pulpit as 'Godless' and 'immoral' ; their product 
as mannerless and disobedient. 'We think,' says a 
Slovak leader, 'that the parochial school pupils are 
more pious, more respectful towards parents and 



30 Stop Thief 

towards all persons in authority.' The Polish, Lith- 
uanian, or Slovak priest, less often the German or 
Bohemian, says bluntly: 'If you send your children 
to the public schools, they will go to hell!' Some- 
times the priest threatens to exclude from the con- 
fessional parents who send their children to the pub- 
lic school. Parishes are formed for groups of the 
same speech, so a parish school will embrace chil- 
dren of only one nationality — German, Polish, Bohe- 
mian, Lithuanian, Croatian, Slovak, Magyar, Portu- 
guese, or French-Canadian, as the case may be. 
Often priest and teachers have been imported, and 
only the mother tongue is used. 'English,' says a 
school superintendent, 'comes to be taught as a 
purely ornamental language, like French in the pub- 
lic schools.' " 

Shameful it is that outwardly expressed rever- 
ence is not a distinguishing trait of the average 
native-born child of Protestant-American parent- 
age. It is also a pity, having its inception in part 
in the misdirected offices of parental affection, in 
part in instinct transmitted to the child which moves 
him to self-centered acts, and in part in the grow- 
ing tendency of parents to shunt their children into 
the streets, there to absorb the dugout manners of 
Gavrouche, the gutter snipe; but it would seem 
reverence for authority is also given quite too little 
of secular direction by the mentors of the offspring 
of aliens, who comprise about four-fifths of the 



Immigration 31 

youths who face judges in juvenile courts. Still, 
that those straylings are headed for a literal "hell" 
is an unthinkable paradox in the light of a compas- 
sionate God. 

Professor Ross describes as follows the drag on 
social progress due to the injection of 10,000 "six- 
teenth-century aliens" into the life of an anthracite 
town of 26,000 inhabitants: 

"By their presence the foreigners necessarily low- 
er the general plane of intelligence, self-restraint, 
refinement, orderliness and efficiency. The great ex- 
cess of men among them leads to sexual immorality 
and the diffusion of private diseases. A primitive 
midwifery is practiced, and the ignorance of the 
poor mothers fills the cemetery with tiny graves. 
The women go about their homes barefoot, and their 
rooms and clothing reek with the odors of cooking 
and uncleanliness. The standards of modesty are 
Elizabethan. Barriers of speech, education and re- 
ligious faith split the people into unsympathetic, 
even hostile, camps. The worst element in the com- 
munity makes use of the ignorance and the venality 
of the foreign-born voters to exclude the better citi- 
zens from any share in the control of local affairs. 
The single English daily has so few subscribers that 
it can not afford to offend any of them by exposing 
municipal rottenness. The chance to prey on the 
ignorant foreigner tempts the cupidity and corrupts 
the ethics of local business and professional men. 



32 Stop Thief 

Familiarity with the immodesties of the foreigners 
coarsens the native-born. With the basest Amer- 
icans and lowest foreigners united by thirst and 
greed, while the decent Americans and decent for- 
eigners understand one another too little for team- 
work, it is not surprising that the municipal gov- 
ernment is poor and the taxpayers are robbed. The 
police force, composed of four Lithuanians, two 
Poles, one Irishman, and one German, is so ineffi- 
cient that 'pistol-toting' is common among all class- 
es. At times hold-ups have been so frequent that it 
was not considered safe for a well-dressed person 
to show himself in the foreign sections after dark." 
Hard facts face to the constantly deteriorating 
quality of the average unit of the American mass : 

(1) In 1880, 81.6; in 1890, 118.2; in 1904, 183.6, 
and in 1910, 204.2, per 100,000 of the population 
were enumerated in institutions for the insane. That 
is an approximate increase of 100,000 in thirty 
years, and the record is certainly worse since 1910. 

(2) In New York State, the number of registered 
cases of the insane has increased 123 per cent dur- 
ing the last twenty-four years, while the population 
of the State has increased but 65 per cent. 

(3) The State of New York has spent $60,000,- 
000 for the care of the insane since 1846, and 
$30,000,000 for the care of defective immigrants. 
Those in the state hospitals have increased 104 per 



Immigration 33 

cent during the last decade. The crux of the mat- 
ter is that the bulk of $90,000,000 has gone for 
the care of alien defectives and undesirables. 

(4) Since 1904, 2,082,746 immigrants have taken 
up residence in New York State, to which figures 
about 1,400,000 have been added by birth. In New 
York City, those of Semitic extraction alone strike 
close to one-twentieth of the total population. The 
present conditions in Russia are largely due to the 
machinations of apostate Jews and former New 
York City transients. 

(5) A special committee of the Society for the 
Prevention of Cruelty to Children reported Febru- 
ary 13th, 1912, that 9,000 feeble-minded children 
were then attending the public schools of New York 
City, thirty per cent of whom were the progeny of 
aliens, or of newly-naturalized citizens. Since near- 
ly all cities of the first and second class would prob- 
ably give approximate figures, the estimate by Dr. 
Havelock Ellis of "one mental defective to every 
184 of our total population" is in line with reason- 
able deduction. 

(6) One-thousand-and-seventy-seven aliens from 
the Orient, out of 2,255 seeking admission from 
September 23rd, 1910, to November 30th, 1911, 
showed the ova of the hookworm, that most dreaded 
parasite. 

(7) There were 15,000 suicides in the United 



34 Stop Thief 

States in 1913. The smaller cities for the first time 
gave a greater percentage of suicides to the million 
inhabitants than the larger : sign of the letting down 
of intrinsic stamina. 

It is informing to note how the foreign strain 
persists as in the crime group, through the insane, 
pauper, and feeble-minded gamuts, as. observe our 
rearranged excerpts from the census of 1910: 

(A) Insane, male, white, in institutions January 

1st, 1910: 

Total, 91,617. Native-born, 35,238. 

Foreign-born 28,415 

Foreign and mixed parent- 
age 15,415 

75% of nativity unknown.. 7,493 

75% of parentage unknown 1,918 



53,241, equals 57% plus. 

(B) Paupers, white, in almshouses January 1st, 

1910: 

Total, 77,734. Native-born, 32,458. 

Foreign-born 33,125 

Foreign and mixed parent- 
age 10,077 

75% of parentage unknown 1,289 

75% of nativity unknown.. 266 



44,757, equals 57% plus. 



Immigration 85 

(C) Feeble-minded, white, in institutions Janu- 
ary 1st, 1910: 
Total, 20,441. Native-born, 8,408. 

Foreign-born 1,247 

Foreign and mixed parent- 
age 5,413 

75% of parentage unknown 3,231 
75% of nativity unknown.. 798 



10,689, equals 52% plus. 

Add the colored contingent to the compilations, 
consider in connection therewith the positive Negro 
problem, as well as aftermath war problems, and it 
would seem that we have chore enough to put the 
houses in order that are included within our conti- 
nental boundaries and outlying possessions, without 
courting foreign complications. 

Weighing the figures given, we are to cling to 
the cardinal fact that the foreign-born constituted 
but one-sixth of the total population in 1910, and 
to the further, neglected truth that native-born 
children of the foreign-born have been enumerated 
with the native-born under the Constitution. Those 
enumerations were falsely construed while we were 
standardizing citizens from the old pioneering stock. 
They now front facts that may easily prove fate- 
ful. 

It would take three generations to make all-wool 



36 Stop Thief 

Americans of the grand majority of aliens we have 
received during the last two decades. Assuming the 
intrinsic worth of such as prospective citizens, the 
consummation named were impossible, because an 
increasing percentage of immigrants are nomads 
who come, earn and hoard ; go, and remove with them 
their earned increment. Could we close the national 
account with a monetary entry, it wouldn't matter 
in the name of altruism ; but we can not take lightly 
the constantly deteriorating quality of the average 
of our people. 

Additional immigration facts dovetail into the 
conclusions reached in this chapter: 

For 1914, only 23,891 immigrants were ticketed 
for the great agricultural States of Iowa, Kansas, 
Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Okla- 
homa, while 344,663 — over one-fourth of the total 
immigration — were destined to New York State. 

The South Italians furnish the largest number 
of alien immigrants, and of those who emigrate. In 
1912, 135,830 entered, 96,880 returned; in 1914, 
251,612 entered, 72,767 returned. Southern Ital- 
ians formed over twenty per cent of the total immi- 
gration in 1914. Recall thereof Chief of Police 
Cutrera's evidence. 

In 1914, 790,607 persons, over sixty-five per cent 
of the immigrants for that year, were destined to 
five States — New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, 
Illinois and Pennsylvania. These same States con- 



Immigration 37 

tained 30.7 per cent of the continental population. 
At no time since the census bureau has compiled a 
record thereof have the North Atlantic and the 
North Central States contained less than 85 per 
cent of the foreign-born. 

For the decade ending 1910, nearly nine million 
immigrants landed in the United States. That total 
exceeds one-third of all the arrivals from Europe 
since 1820, and would better than repopulate the 
New England states. In 1914, 1,218,000 arrived. 
This number would repopulate the States of Dela- 
ware, Idaho, Arizona, Nevada and Wyoming. 

Between 1900 and 1910 the number of natives of 
northern and western Europe m the United States 
decreased from 7,016,000 to 6,11^0,000, while the 
southern arid eastern Europeans increased from 
1,83%,000 to 5,04.8,000. 

Millions of immigrants now show a marked dis- 
taste for citizenship. In 1910 there were 2,266,535 
foreign-born white males 21 years of age or over 
in the United States who had not taken out their 
first naturalization papers, while in 1900 the num- 
ber of such was 914,917. Putting it another way, 
in 1900 only 18.7 per cent of eligible immigrants 
had taken no step toward acquiring citizenship, 
while in 1910 more than 34 per cent had failed so 
to do. This argues an ominous increase of nearly 
100 per cent of alien mercenaries. 

Tracing census statistics we should neither unduly 



88 Stop Thief 

emphasize factors nor miss their significance. Exam- 
ples: It is to be expected that but 15.4 per cent 
of paupers reported January 1st, 1910, were able- 
bodied, else the bulk of the major 84.6 per cent 
probably would not have become a public charge. 
Entirely another matter it is that 67.3 per cent of 
all of them were mentally or physically defective, 
because the paupers might issue from more or less 
of unfortuitous circumstance, while the latter point 
in the main to congenital flaw. There is a distinct 
sociologic difference between pauperism by the bru- 
tal arm of chancery, and pauperism which is super- 
induced by physical and mental defect. 

We are to differentiate further and sharply as 
between liberty-loving home-seekers and the like of 
the 71 per cent of Italian transients for the year 
1912. This we must do because, from the ranks of 
such are recruited the most insistent perpetrators 
of the most flippant and far-reaching of social 
crimes. 

The Congress is considering acts to regulate im- 
migration to, and aliens in, the United States. If 
the bill that receives the President's approval is to 
be comprehensively operative, it must, first of all, 
breathe unequivocally that America has tipped the 
limit in attempt to absorb the world's refuse of 
humans. No nation can pile on that and remain 
either virile or virtuous. 

Secondly, any such act that postulates a too nice 



Immigration 39 

choice of aliens will fight itself; it will, particularly 
at this time, because foreign governments will see 
to it, in so far as they can, that we do not pick 
and choose of artisans they will need indefinitely for 
their own industrial reconstruction. 

Palpably, our aim should be to induce immigra- 
tion to our shores of young laborers who are sound 
from hoof to dome, and who bear with them the will 
to win out in the land of their adoption under its 
laws. We shall need them on our farms, and for the 
rough work in our shops. Ignorance that roots to 
nothing more alarming than restricted opportunity, 
and which still leaves a lad keen to distinguish be- 
tween right and wrong and to dig for better fare, 
need worry nobody. The equipment in their teens of 
several of America's mental giants was little better. 

The "reading test" would prove abortive for the 
same reason that Binet-Simon tests are passed at 
inflated values ; both would tag individuals much too 
arbitrarily on warrant of surface signs which, in 
the majority of instances,' are naught more alarm- 
ing respectively than that the tagged had had not 
so much as a fighting chance for cultural improve- 
ment, or that the Almighty decrees the minds of His 
children shall unfold differently as to time not only, 
but also as to their choice of pabulum, and bent for 
activities. Otherwise, human attributes would par- 
allel and front each other. 

Further, legislation should provide for sufficient 



40 Stop Thief 

of immigration department attaches to our consular 
service in countries whence come the bulk of immi- 
grants. Again, no immigration act will prove re- 
strictive in the sense that it is drawn, which leaves 
too much to the vigilance, honesty, opportunity, and 
capacity of the agents of common carriers. Once 
more, the Department of Immigration should oper- 
ate under one, supreme head. There should be no 
such reading in an immigration act as, "under such 
rules and regulations as the Commissioner General 
of Immigration with the approval of the Secretary 
of Labor may proscribe, both as to the admission 
and return of such aliens." Such specifications im- 
pose divided responsibility, invite complications with 
conflict of authority, and reel out red tape. 

Native or alien, child or man, our chore is to 
groove him in accordance with his bent, while we 
capitalize in him habits of industry, honesty, fru- 
gality, and moderation. In any case, Culture will 
spread her roots in soil best adapted to her office 
of preserving finite balances established in the In- 
finite mind. 

Culture itself but creeps which does not sense 
similar truths in dissimilar facts such as that Gui- 
teau, the slayer of Garfield, cuddled calculus; while 
the "almost illiterate" Confederate General N. B. 
Forrest was rated the most adroit field tactician and 
remarkable man the Civil War produced by dis- 
tinguished experts like General Tecumseh Sherman, 



Imrmgration 41 

Joseph E. Johnson and Lord Wolseley. Sherman's 
assertion that Forrest "never read a military book 
in his life" is attested by this incident of the issue 
at Fort Donelson : At a certain stage of the melee, 
Forrest should have ordered for the charge, bay- 
onets fixed; but he couldn't think out the precise 
commands, so he yelled, "Punch 'em, boys; damn 
'em, punch 'em !" So much for incurable defect, and 
virgin intelligence. 

Be all as it may, the United States will be well 
rid of the jam of immigration for a breathing spell 
in which to adjust to the exactions of the newly- 
naturalized, and those who may decide for citizen- 
ship later on. During that spell, we must needs 
stalk and stamp out professional agitators who prey 
upon primitive passions, limited understanding, and 
lean pocketbooks, and who have thereby made it so 
difficult to fit American lenses to the majority of 
aliens we have received during late years. 

During that spell we should also consider if it 
will not be good policy to enter into agreement with 
carefully-selected American companies by which they 
shall establish trans-oceanic lines and operate them 
in part for immigrant transportation to the exclu- 
sion for that purpose of all other American-con- 
trolled bottoms ; the said agreement to include speci- 
fications for the manning of these vessels with such 
officers and agents of the government as would best 
conserve the governmental use of the said vessels 



42 Stop Thief 

in peace and for war, on the declaration of which 
they should, under the terms of the said agreement, 
pass automatically to government control and be 
employed as scout cruisers. Then require of each 
and every immigrant, and of each and every nation 
whence he comes, that the immigrant shall produce 
at the port of egress a paper stamped with the seal 
of his government by an authorized agent thereof, 
which seal shall attest for the immigrant a clean 
bill of character, as well as of mental and physical 
health. Then search out the man and his vise before 
he is allowed to board any one of the aforesaid 
vessels at a port of egress. 

A measure of the kind would place where it be- 
longs the responsibility for deportable individuals. 
It should also assure their return into the hands of 
the said agents of the country whence they came, 
with reimbursement, in toto, for their handling, both 
ways. And it should leave us so few to deport that 
their numbers would be negligible. 

If we can not close our ports of entry to immi- 
grants transported in foreign bottoms, we can and 
should demand of such immigrants that they shall 
produce, first of all at ports of egress, the f orenamed 
certificates of character and mental and bodily well- 
being. That regulation, plus the monetary imposi- 
tion for deportables, would work out in due time to 
discourage the immigration to our shores of indi- 



Irnwiigration 43 

viduals who are deportable under our immigration 
restrictions now operative. 

Once the scope of the intention of our govern- 
ment in the matter were spread abroad, it is to be 
presumed reasonably that immigrants would assure, 
in so far as they could at the port of egress, their 
landing and reception here. Then, too, it is a good 
guess that serious-minded immigrants, who seek to 
get a grip on American soil, would care to step at 
once under the paternal protection of the Stars and 
Stripes. 

There are obstacles in the way of the departures 
recommended, just as there are obstacles in the way 
of all departure from time-bound custom ; but nega- 
tions which may be injected are trivial compared 
with the manifold and manifest advantages that 
would accrue from the faithful prosecution of meas- 
ures certain to insure initial supervision and control 
over, and inspection and direction of, alien immi- 
grants. 

We should say that the officers of the vessels 
should include the following governmental represen- 
tatives: Commanders and their immediate subordi- 
nates ; Surgeons ; Immigration Inspectors and agents 
of the Secret Service; Chief Engineers; Chief Elec- 
tricians; and Wireless Operators. Then make the 
service and training of the entire crew correspond 
reasonably with that of a crew of a craft of the 



44 Stop Thief 

line. And then we should not thrash about, hurly- 
burly, during times of stress, in pursuit of a nucleus 
of scout cruisers: cruisers shaped, manned and 
coursed all of the time to help meet any emergency 
that might arise. 



CHAPTER II 

CRIME BY SUGGESTION 

Nothing cheats man like bad suggestion. Con- 
versely, good suggestion is first aid to manliness. 
Could the measure of the former to induce oblique 
careers be put in print, it might stimulate to saner 
service for the dupes of crime. 

Concrete expression demarcates suggestion and 
example, albeit they stand in the relation of skin 
to flesh in the molding of human clay. Their nearly 
synonymous meaning is to be understood here. 

Whether suggestion is ocular or oral the result 
is relatively the same. Conduct is suggested mainly 
by way of the eye and ear. The rest resides in the 
reasoning faculty. Obedient to natural and acquired 
power to classify, that faculty assays the ideas and 
images conveyed to it by the senses. Lacking that 
power, the brain halts, the will wobbles, and the 
weakling flounders in a maze of conflicting magni- 
tudes. Values are frequently established in the mind 
of such an one by self-pointed prototypes, them- 
selves helped to unlawful selection by false sug- 
gestion. 

Thereto attaches a tale much too complex for 
45- 



46 Stop Thief 

synthetic treatment by restricted paragraphs. It 
is not the purpose of the writer to coax the reader 
into theoretical consideration of perverse man. Many 
have done that who have had no call to guide ; many 
who have left earnest searchers with contempt for 
visible signs, not a whit less serviceable because 
falsely read. 

For one, ILombroso stampeded the unthinking 
with a catch-phrase. He did so, in that human or- 
ganisms are dissimilar and variable. Twins betimes 
come close to absolute similarity, yet they differ as 
to structure, function, mental bias, tastes, and 
traits of character. Anthropology discredited the 
"criminal type" fallacy, decades ago ; yet many cling 
to a purblind paring of the parts of speech in crude 
attempt to account for the criminal. 

Trading on the predilections of their fellows for 
gaudy coloring, not a few shrewd Yankees of old had 
recourse to pots of paint. Certain of their custom- 
ers craved bizarre effects and got them in blatant, 
yellow-striped blue, spread over basic defects. For 
any twinge of conscience thereof the painter might 
have felt, he probably eased it with the thought 
that the sooner a man finds he can be flimflammed 
by a specious veneer, the better for his course and 
intercourse. 

The sooner the taxpayer realizes that onerous 
taxation for the upkeep of criminals reduces largely 
to attempt to daub over their *'basic defects/' the 



Crime by Suggestion 47 

better for his peace and pocketbook. Also, it will 
be better for the criminal, concerning whom the man 
who pays will want to know about simple and amend- 
able causes for criminousness. Knowing it, he will 
understand that thousands of inherently decent lads 
have been suggested over the deadline, and that 
pompous polysyllables designate essentially but a 
minor fraction of them. And then he will have 
gripped the fact that next to damning outright a 
wayward lad who is hell-bent on the toboggan of 
crime, is to prescribe for him incidental, "bizarre'* 
prison activities, and for the rest allow him to hiber- 
nate, vegetate, and fake. If the subject is a truly 
graded moron, his very exactions assure the asser- 
tion, the which involves basic criminal suggestion. 

No estimate worth considering can be made of the 
percentage of a given mass on whom, criminal sug- 
gestion creeps and gives the final shove over the 
brink. Being a fundamental force, suggestion rings 
no bells as it takes up its mainly sub-conscious habi- 
tation; indeed, many an intelligent victim does not 
rate it as suggestion, even when it worms to his 
conscious thoughts and grooves them. 

Crass evidence of the effect on the psychology of 
the mob of indirect suggestion, passing to direct 
suggestion, is in the minds of all who lend eye to 
such matters. Guyau cites this extreme case: 

Following the crack of a pistol, fired in the Quar- 
tier Latin, Paris, a hatless man rushed out of a res- 



48 Stop Thief 

taurant and a'down the street. Pedestrians who 
heard the shot and saw the highly-excited one cut 
for it, took up the chase. "Stop the murderer! 
Stop the murderer !" they cried. Hard-pressed while 
hearing the cries of his pursuers, the terrorized man 
exclaimed, "My God ! They'll kill me !" His pursu- 
ers immediately echoed the suggestion. "Kill him! 
Kill him!" yelled they, and it was done with their 
hands and feet ; not advisedly, perhaps, and not nec- 
essarily so in order to press Guyau's point, which 
is that many individual and mob murders are due 
to suggestion either direct, indirect, or both, as 
was the case in this instance. The peculiar value 
of Guyau's recital consists in the fact that the pro- 
prietor of the restaurant fired the shot over the 
head of the waiter, for the purpose of bringing him 
to his senses as he sprang to assault the proprietor 
during a dispute about wages. 

A common case in point is this: The last five 
lads received by the writer while he was Acting Su- 
perintendent of the State Industrial School at 
Rochester, N. Y., were committed for stealing coal 
from a freight yard. Each lad was questioned 
closely and induced to repeat the exact words his 
parent used when sending him for coal. In sub- 
stance, the instruction in every instance was, "Go 
and get some coal." The parents knew that sev- 
eral arrests had ensued upon "picking" coal out 
of the cars in the yard. The boys had clear ideas 



Crime by Suggestion 49 

of the possible consequences of the thefts, but chose 
the alternative of depending upon their wits to dodge 
the arm of the law, and thus avoid the domestic 
hand. Such direct-indirect suggestion edges very 
close, of course, to crime by command. 

But drinking in gulps to the lees of suggestion is 
only the gross way of getting drunk on it. Just 
as the inebriate is confirmed nip by nip while cock- 
sure that he can spurn the concluding "kick" of 
liquor, so a young man may sip of criminal sugges- 
tion until his mind is intoxicated by it. Usually he 
will have vitiated his blood and brain first off 
through choice of the pace that kills. Thereafter, 
ths slow grind is gruelling to him. Were it not, 
heads of hives of industry will have none of a rousta- 
bout who knows nothing worth while. He is there- 
fore ripe for criminal suggestion, — the tsetse fly 
that puts conscience to sleep. 

And then, turn which way he will, it is there, is 
the fly, buzzing before the young man's eyes: At 
the mart; on change; of the meat of the "movie" 
film ; up and down stage ; in the raucous if plausible 
voices of gangsters, and in the long arms of their 
masters who sack, then sacrifice, pawns ; under 
spread-type captions in "yellow" journals which 
pander for pelf to the predatory instincts of the 
canaille; by the heavy hand of the "starker" and 
his pull on the purses and "influence" of meaner 
criminals who pay for murderous blows; issuing 



50 Stop Thief 

from multi-millions of "water" in stock, pyramided 
slick sleight-of-hand- by sharpers who elect that the 
plodding consumer shall settle, oozed by oily poli- 
ticians who play and pay to hold their jobs, and 
let virtue go hang; carried in the mandates of 
judges who are either justice-blind, or held at bay 
by one or another form of political chicanery ; echo- 
ing and reechoing from legislation that is a joke, or 
is jokerized, or juggles with numbers while it jeop- 
ards equities; and finally, out of public opinion 
which suggests potential criminals into contempt for 
law and for agents of the law, and to bank on and 
"bunko" those who preen themselves while pushing 
prison schemes Which, suggest slipping lads into 
being but inefficient dependents at best; and at the 
worst, crass cheats, liars and malignerers. 

Because inertia makes the average man as lazy as 
he dares to be, it is well that the spur of competi- 
tive pressure is always upon him, though a certain 
percentage of the unequipped will foozle under that 
process of elimination; but they need not go down 
to crime in anything like the numbers they now do, 
and they will not when they can rely upon the right 
cue from those at the top. 

The child is most imitative out of necessity. He 
is dependent objectively for rightly-ordered ideas. 
Mentally backward children particularly must be 
guided by sound example and suggestion. They 
stand or stumble with those to whom they look for 



Crime by Suggestion 51 

light and inspiration. While such weight of influ- 
ence governs as to the acquired social worth of all 
children, the emphasis must be placed as given. 
Hence appreciable responsibility for the criminal 
of the money-mad who utter spurious coin of char- 
acter. Mainly because of the wholesale moral thief 
it is that we have always with us a host of more 
petty, predatory felons. 

A nearly-submerged lad cannot but seem to attest 
surface conclusions of the Binet-Simon specialist. 
He is, practically, a moron, yet he will note con- 
trasts keenly enough. Essentially, it will be borne 
in upon him that the sprouting thief spreads "easy 
money" for luxuries, while he aches for a square 
meal. 

"Easy money !" That is as if made to his order. 
He could earn a living by actual toil, but that he 
has been taught to spurn. Then why not the grab- 
bag? Why not, when everybody who is anybody to 
him has both hands in it? "Turn which way he will, 
it is there, — is the fly." And so, usually out of his 
blood and bringing-up, backed by the flood of anti- 
social suggestion and example exerted upon him, 
he breaks into the criminal game. Then he waxes 
a bit too bold about it, and the reformatory gets 
him. 

And then what? What, now that he is trapped 
with the body and brain of him expressing the sum 
of his having been cheated at birth, and a devotee 



52 Stop Thief 

of vice and crime? For him who therefor reasons 
obliquely from a depraved basis, what institutional 
treatment shall we prescribe? What, if he is un- 
taught, unskilled, and sneers at honestly-earned 
money? Shall we pay out still more of crime- 
breeding suggestion to a slacker who would fake us 
with crude criminal cunning into the belief that ac- 
tivities which headed him for the abyss are the prime 
factors of a reformative regime? 

What of it if the bulk of male prisoners would 
elect to capitalize parasital sports, and pass up 
progress? Does such natural selection constitute 
a sound reason for reversing the rational order of 
growth of an unfolding lad whom sin has debauched, 
and unfortuitous circumstance threatens to shunt 
out of so much as a fighting chance to make good? 

What the trick of reasoning which specifies more 
than less of grind for the male child at school, and 
more than less of pug-ugTy play for the man- 
child in prison? What the trick, indeed, when in 
the former case time is comparatively a negative 
consideration, whereas in the latter instance it is 
of cardinal consequence? 

In order to prove efficient, the indefinite sentence 
must presuppose a closely applied course of educa- 
tion and training for ignorant, unskilled lads who 
are committed under maximum sentences which run 
to twenty years, but who make their paroles in fif- 



Crime by Suggestion* 53 

teen months on the average. What warrant, then, is 
there, for charging their minds with the suggestion 
that the prison day is properly given over largely 
to the criminal rounder's idea of reaction to work, 
and the evening of the day to his crime-suggesting 
choice of amusement? 

If the slogan "Beat it!" is, as it is, ever ready 
to the tongue of a class of felons who have been and 
elect to remain predatory parasites ; and if the terse 
sentence does, as it does, adumbrate pretense and 
criminal cunning of anti-social drones to deceive, 
should we plan and prosecute for them, or should 
we sub-let the job to their criminal prototypes? 

If a crime is a disease and the criminal irrespon- 
sible, as protagonists have had it baldly, why act 
on their paradoxical cue and assign the diseased and 
irresponsible to set up any part of a prison pros- 
pectus ? 

Whether crime is or is not a disease, — and it isn't, 
in the main, by so much as a malignant germ, — if 
having committed it fits singularly to prescribe for 
criminals and to preside over their destinies, ought 
we not select institutional staffs from those bred 
by criminals and educated to criminality? 

If we are to be guided by the hardly half -opened 
minds of criminals who are always under pressure 
more or less ominous to decide for those with whom 
they trained in free life and touch elbows in prison, 



54 Stop Thief 

why tax to pay the salaries of penologists ? Or, since 
Nature will not abide monopoly, why confine to the 
criminal the acquirement of a most serviceable apti- 
tude? 

If the visible sign in an atmosphere of criminal 
camaraderie is the desideratum, why not begin at 
the beginning? Why not make a part of the public 
school course such as the ability to pick the pockets 
of a Fagin dummy figure and not jingle one of its 
pendant-hung bells? That were a fine foil for mov- 
ing pictures, the bulk of which are crassly crime- 
suggestive, or worse; and for the present morbid 
craze over the fistic brute and his brutalities ; brutal- 
ities which suggest the last abomination, and make 
babble about "disarmament" ridiculous. 

Apropos, mark this suggestive paradox: The 
very cult that cried to the high heaven against in- 
fliction of a fatherly spanking by a public agent on 
the persons of persistently refractory lads, is the 
very cult that winks at pugilistic barbarism in the 
roped arena which leaves mere bantams of lads' 
faces to the floor, prone and senseless, with the blood 
streaming from their mouths and ears. Such sea- 
soning of the social broth must sorely tax the pa- 
tience of an all-merciful Father. 

If it is unthinkable that school children shall 
run the schools, college lads the colleges, privates 
the army, and patients the hospitals, substantially 



Crime by Suggestion 55 

why should we yield the disciplinary reins of a 
prison into the hands of weaklings ; weaklings by the 
very fact that they had not mastered the crime 
instinct? 

Granted that to the general population of a 
prison the head of it should stand in the relation of 
father to family; but why has he need of inmate 
vicars to do it? If he is a real criminologist by 
right of thorough preparation and experience, is 
true-hearted, broad-minded, and far-sighted as he 
should be or not be at the head, why proscribe his 
citizen staff and break his best hold on a big thing 
through passing plenary powers to prisoners: ergo, 
to those who were not even wise enough to keep out 
of prison ? Why not himself the better plan, direct, 
pursue, decide, and require of his subordinates that 
they shall adjust to his ideas and carry out his 
instructions? Why decentralize power which can 
and should be made the highest in potential? 

Let surface indications be what they may, crimi- 
nals are bound by ties which no junta of imprisoned 
felons would dare ignore. Then why risk vital 
throws to those, a certain percentage of whom are 
bound to let the State down by way of subterranean 
routes, into all of the windings of which a warden 
could not penetrate with the wisdom of a Solon, mir- 
rored by the countless eyes of night? Can sugges- 
tion of its kind be more pernicious than that which 



56 Stop Thief 

motives the prisoner to euchre reformative endeavor? 

Collated in cold ink, such queries seem to border on 
bouff e ; yet they shadow forth methods which the ill- 
advised, unequipped, and flippant would fasten on a 
fundamental work. As played by some, it would 
appear that the game of penology is to see which 
one can overlap the others by the widest margin 
with the last freak manoeuvre, charged with the 
most of anti-social suggestion? 

It is inconceivable how so many whose judgment 
is otherwise dependable, can be betrayed into the 
belief that relative nothings like baseball and bone- 
rattling are vital adjuncts of prison and personal 
reform. Prison sports have their best use giving 
body-free exercise on a week-end afternoon. Beyond 
that they are easily overdone and made non- 
reformative. Better procedure is to turn the men 
into the open and let them frolic and converse at 
will, thus exercising the mass, instead of the few. 

Sports stagnate when run athwart of the whole^- 
ness and wholesomeness of correctional training. 
Where military calisthenics are daily interspersed 
with periods of free conversation and movement in 
the open, by-play is ordinarily of consequence minor 
to regulations which require of the men that they 
shall take scrupulous care of their teeth, feet, and 
person. Contrariwise, sanely-applied exercise is es- 
sential for those whose movements are otherwise re- 
stricted. First of all, the worst of humans must 



Crime by Suggestion 57 

be allowed to stretch their muscles freely, if we ex- 
pect them to align for reformation. 

Humanitarian efforts are never wholly wasted on 
prisoners; albeit to wander too far afield letting 
down bars freemen have to keep up, is to cross the 
best of intentions. 

The trend of nigger minstrels, and their ilk, in 
prison, is unerringly to the gutter; hence, they 
should be sliced sparingly between saner forms of 
amusement designed to educate as well as to please, 
and to break the monotony of the early-night 
schedule. 

The problem of reformation never requires less 
than the best of all reformative agents through as- 
signing to each its due place and prominence. The 
current itch is to confound magnitudes, and to ar- 
range regimes in reverse of the order of weight for 
influence. Weighing truly, the living thing may be 
done for a physically laden lad through turning him 
loose into the sunlight, there to relax as he lists. 
The exactions of the individual case often reach 
beyond the range of hard and fast rule. 

Methods of reform are uniquely subject to limi- 
tations ; yet in whatsoever we labor to lift a prisoner 
out of the mire of fault, we have to hug the truth 
that the average employer will do no such thing for 
him, short of palpable efforts for himself of the man 
on parole. What he thinks of us may be inciden- 
tally important ; but what he can do with his hands 



58 Stop Thief 

and brain is always the vital consideration. To 
suggest else to the prisoner is to suggest him into 
crime. 

The average man on parole will not endure unless 
he can command in the labor mart. Therefore the 
building up of him in prison needs must proceed from 
broad bases, such as that crime stalks the indus- 
trial dunce and drone; that social rehabilitation 
smiles on the paroled man who has the will to market 
skill won within prison walls; that the criminal re- 
duces largely to habit, as do we all ; and that indus- 
trial habit often induces man-like expression where 
precept fails to strike in. 

The primal duty of correctional institutions 
should be to teach their charges serviceable occupa- 
tions, and to teach them to stay taught. The latter 
phrase presumes the spiritual side of the instruction, 
and timely suggestion to charge the minds of the 
pupils with the importance of that side in the for- 
mation and reformation of character. 

To lend a mere smattering of handicraft skill to 
the average of convicted felons is dangerous; it is 
dangerous not because of the illegal use he can make 
of it, but for the reason that he will quite reliably* 
cave in when, having tried him out, his first employer 
refuses to take him at his own, nearly always in 
such instance, inflated trade valuation. Naturally, 
he will hold in contempt thereafter a prison-taught 
trade which relegates him to the level of a scrub ap- 



Crime hy Suggestion 59 

prentice whom journeymen chivey, and with whom 
they break industrial bread grudgingly. Employers 
advisedly refuse criminal records tacked to less than 
mediocre tool cunning, when skilled crime-free men 
are available. 

Therefor utopian projects for placing prison- 
paroled apprentices can but serve to further muddle 
prison methods, and to further muddle public 
opinion concerning those methods. Laudable, for 
example, as is the much-touted "Ford way," it would 
break the average manufacturer should he essay a 
scheme favored by an abnormal demand for automo- 
biles in general, and for the Ford machine in par- 
ticular. 

Only in the prospectus is the automobile game all 
sunshine, soul-stirring scenery, and smooth going. 
Sundry "joyriding" which few can afford, and which 
no young woman should be allowed to dare, either 
morally or physically, is already docketed a con- 
tributing cause of crime in the biological boxes of 
reform institutions. 

George Fitch, the writer of the delightful "Vest 
Pocket Essays," enlarges somewhat in one of those 
essays on our idea, in these words : 

"The bona fide farmer puts in all his oats in a 
few days, but the happy young man with the soft 
pompadour hair and the pellet of gray matter under 
his left ear sows wild oats with industry for as 
much as ten years at a time, frequently working 



60 Stop Thief 

twenty-four hours a day at the job. Wild oats 
were formerly sown by hand, but machinery is get- 
ting into the field of course and at the present most 
of them are sown by automobile. An earnest toiler 
in a fast automobile with a few assistants can sow 
enough wild oats in one evening to reap about four 
decades of unavailing regrets spotted with divorce 
suits, personal injury damages and red-nosed 
gloom." Also, he can and does, vitally aided by 
speed, while under cover, sow death and destruction. 

Even if all were beneficence that pertains to cre- 
ations which encourage the craze to compete with 
the bird, and which take their daily toll of human 
lives and of the higher duties of the living; and 
were the wage sheets of factories that pay an un- 
natural wage sprayed with the names of ex- 
prisoners, they would pluck but a hair from bris- 
tling crime ; they would, because abnormal industrial 
conditions can not long endure, and can not there- 
fore long retard elimination of the industrially out- 
classed ; and because of the primary and as yet 
unsurmounted difficulty, that approximately fifteen 
per cent of felons choose to be and to remain predal 
parasites who break the law as flippantly as they 
challenge arrest, and sneer at conviction and im- 
prisonment. 

When a persistent lawbreaker can be weaned from 
the breast of crime by moral suasion plus the chance 



Crime by Suggestion 61 

to earn honestly "five dollars per/ 5 he is not and 
never had been, a "predal parasite." He is and 
always had been something of a Jean Valjean, the 
psychology of whose exaggerated case has been so 
faultily analyzed and applied. 

It is some piece of road up grade from your ha- 
hitual criminal to an intrinsic Jean Valjean; to Jean 
the breadwinner; to Jean who passed the substance 
to his sister's child and gnawed bone at table when 
he couldn't win bread ; to Jean who would have gone 
on gnawing at bone rather than have taken the long 
chance for himself with his fists which he took that 
he might stay the hunger of the loved ones of his 
house; ones loved in a snarling, wolfish way, to be 
sure, but to the bone; and the Jean whose soul the 
good Abbe could singe with his silver candle-sticks, 
and whose knees were brought to earth by after- 
thought of the accusing cries of the lad Gervais over 
the loss of his Louis d'or. Jean's shoe planted stol- 
idly on that piece of gold symbolizes the "predal 
parasite's" mental attitude towards precious reform 
metal strewn in his path. 

Jean's subsequent self abasement and consecra- 
tion to the good of his fellows served well the quill 
of the master of didactic, sledge-hammer fiction. 
It serves as well to point Duty to the last and least 
of men, though it utterly failed Hugo at his own 
hearth. There, he could not father even a brace 



62 Stop Thief 

of his very own, whom he indulged in character- 
killing license and thus suggested them on to vacant 
lives and violent deaths. 

Specifically in regard to his studied sneers at the 
badge of authority, — most pernicious of sugges- 
tion — and to his helplessness to do for two of his 
own cubs that which he demanded of others to de- 
liver for criminals, Hugo reminds of certain present- 
day propagandists. They, too, stretch hyperbole 
when they suggest felons into the belief that agents 
of the law are nasty to take and sure to disagree. 
They, too, thereby speed potential criminals to 
prison and back therefrom to "vacant lives and vio- 
lent deaths." They, too, fail miserably when it 
comes to really fathering sin-scorched humans in all 
that the term fathering implies ; and they will until 
they grub for the truth that certain of "sporting," 
as well as "Idle hands find employment in the work- 
shop of the devil." 

The kernel of crime lies within the shell which 
covers the ill-fated "fifteen per cent"; hence we 
needs must help build, and lave, and salve so as to 
reach the mounting fraction that keeps the keeper 
agog. Most of that fraction can be reached, but 
not until all engaged at the saving pull practically 
the same car, take sufficient of time, pains, knowledge 
and common sense to the task, and the States ap- 
propriate wherewithal with which to man and groove 
a gigantic undertaking. 



Crime by Suggestion 63 

Trumpeters for freak measures of reform quickly 
brand squirming humans at the bottom of the leap 
"incorrigible," and pass them up in order to for- 
ward and feature reformation of those, the major 
number of whom reform themselves once they are 
helped to a grip on the manual of man that comes 
with maturity. Thus our friends decline the funda- 
mental issue. 

In any case, shifty yet shiftless prison activities 
which suggest to prisoners that crime is negative, 
the criminal a joke, reformation a matter of min- 
utes, and that singularly helpless and needy felons 
are abused when not amused and encouraged to labor 
or loaf, accept and reject much as whim may dic- 
tate, are bungling caricatures which should shame 
other than the budding brain of a stripling. They 
are also close to criminal. 

The returns are so eloquent of how the foolish 
are fooled that they ought to arrest the attention 
even of the foolish. Just in these localities where 
creme de'mimt criminology has had its longest fling 
and staunchest supporters, just there relatively the 
greatest number of criminals of all grades and ages 
are in the saddle; and just there the identity of the 
recidivist is lost in the very maze of his varied of- 
fenses. Just there, where suspended sentences and 
successive probatory extensions for both occasional 
and many-offense criminals have issued most liber- 
ally. 



64 Stop Thief 

Not the least pernicious of anti-social suggestion 
is that which anchors prisoners of parasital per- 
suasion to their chosen state of mind. In that state 
of mind the prisoner plays up to his conduct record, 
and down to reformative endeavor. Habitually, and 
for no good reason which he can name, he is found 
far short in his trade, school of letters, drawing 
school, and military averages. The ulterior, oft- 
times cunningly-concealed and "worked," yet brazen 
enough by-the-book motive of such an one is, of 
course, to go and get away easily. Without regard 
for his essential preparation as a prospective social 
unit, he would "beat the place" and stamp prison 1 
dust from his shoes into free air at the earliest pos- 
sible moment. That such a course is understandable 
from the criminal's point of view, constitutes the one 
best reason for combating that viewpoint. A bandit- 
drone who elects to deceive, and to drift with the 
criminal tide, may be so marked by nature and neg- 
ative circumstance as to palliate his oblique selec- 
tions ; whereas there is no defensible extenuation for 
a reformative agent who suggests and abets those 
selections. In effect, the suggestion indicated clasps 
hands with crime and stamps it with the seal of 
authority. 

The reverse side of the canvas justly scores con- 
vict and intermediate prisons wherein senseless im- 
positions and deprivations serve but to suggest new 
tricks to old masters at trickery ; but while destruc- 



Crime by Suggestion 65 

tive of the very purpose for which they are imposed, 
those measures are mildly pernicious as compared 
with methods of approach and attack which suggest 
all kinds of license and criminal chicanery. 

As between the brute with his billy and billings- 
gate, and the pseudo-criminologist with his press 
agent, chimera and pose, the burden of fault lies with 
him who has had the greater opportunity to weigh 
related human values. Each in his particular do- 
main waxes pestiferous. Because of what they do 
not know, do not make serious effort to know, but 
do suggest to prisoners, both should be bowed out 
of reform enclosures. 

While such extremists have battled for extremes 
to little or no purpose, as extremists usually do, 
scribes have scribbled little better than scraps con- 
cerning the capital matter of crime by suggestion. 
Explanation is not easy when one has but to dig with 
ordinary horse sense to know that deviltry, or 
divinity, dominates in the human animal quite by 
right of natural sequence ; which is to say : quite by 
right of the kind and weight of suggestion to which 
he has been subjected. 

Penmen do not mention the important question of 
babe-culture, and do dismiss the all-important prob- 
lem of child-culture with a few terse sentences strung 
to platitudes ; albeit perverse will unchecked during 
childhood engenders by auto-suggestion an exagger- 
ated egoism, much of which can and should be ar- 



66 Stop Thief 

rested at the mother's breast, and most of it at her 
knee. In very fact, pre-natal influence may decide 
the destiny of the human-to-be. 

The essential relation of the preceding paragraph 
to the caption of this chapter consists in the fact 
that a safe ninety per cent of crass criminals are 
abnormally self-centered; hence their reaction to 
the ills they visit upon others is either nil or far 
below normal. And so young Westervelt, the cold- 
blooded, two-fold murderer, could remark of his 
mother who had just crooned over and left him for 
good at his trial for the butchery, "I'm glad she's 
gone. I'm tired of her blubberin* and slobberin' 
around the court room." 

Judge Ben B. Lindsey coined this meaty sentence: 
"The time to reform a man is when he is a boy." 
The Judge would have treated us to still more of 
truth had he pursued: "And the time to reform a 
boy is when he is a babe." 

"Let me instruct a lad up through his seventh 
year and I do not care who instructs him after that," 
Ignatius Loyola, S. J., puts it substantially to the 
point, since he postulates all of good suggestion 
from the cradle "up" and epitomizes the primary 
means of preventing crime, in so far as crime can 
be prevented through interposition of human agen- 
cies between it and the individual. 

Withal, it is not given man to frame other than 



Crime by Suggestion 67 

qualified sentences indicative of means by which 
moral stability may be assured to the last of his 
fellows. Physical climacterics alone forbid. For 
instance, final analysis of certain phenomena asso- 
ciated with puberty is denied all cults and culture; 
immutably so, because thereof every lad is a secret 
law unto himself. The period of adolescence marks 
in the one the arrest of criminal tendencies superin- 
duced on call of the mating hunger; and in the 
other', aggravation of those tendencies. Ofttimes 
the lines are shadowy, subliminal lines, elusive to the 
soul's eye of the subject, and patent in part only 
to the microscopic vision of the specialist. 

Assuming a strong heredity with rational bring- 
ing up, the event will usually issue out of the intrin- 
sic moral fibre of a lad. Assuming a tainted hered- 
ity and irrational bringing up, and we have a po- 
tential sexual pervert and pleader in the court of 
last resort. 

Psycho-physical cases are no strangers to our 
contentions. Take two : Given Guiteau to instruct 
"up through his seventh year," it is highly probable 
that Loyola could have relaxed the child's nervously 
tense body and brain, while grooving his thoughts 
sufficiently to have prevented the man Guiteau from 
draping a nation in black by his act: yet of that 
no man can assert dogmatically in the face of the 
fact that nature made of Guiteau a neurotic-erratic 



68 Stop Thief 

peculiarly susceptible to relapse. Conversely, na- 
ture had no more to do with Muenter's murderous 
attempt on the life of Morgan, than she has had to 
do with the anti-social acts of thousands of others 
who were nearly normal throughout the plastic 
years, and whose brains cracked thereafter through 
double stuffing with ideas too closely related. 

Assuming the same situation for Loyola and the 
child Muenter as assumed for Loyola and the child 
Guiteau, the premise reached in the latter case would 
not hold water in the former, because the bent of the 
mind of the child Muenter was rationally religious 
and humanitarian; therefore his thoughts were 
grooved nearly, if not quite as Loyola would have 
striven to groove them ; and therefore the reasonable 
presumption that the striving might have hastened 
expression resultant upon selection of overdoses of 
disturbing mental food, half-digested by a hobby- 
rider who gave no heed to flabby muscles and rebel- 
lious nerves. And yet, if Loyola could have read 
in the child's face that which was palpable in the 
countenance of the under professor, the mentor 
might have rooted his pupil to rational thought. 

However, no capable analyst will deny that a safe 
seventy-five per cent of moving pictures visualize 
the vicious bravado of one or another kidney; nor 
that they carry the young with the crassest of 
sexual suggestion through laxest acceptance of both 
the moral and man-made law; nor that they turn: 



Crime by Suggestion 69 

common sense on its head, while they suggest per- 
petration of more of common rascality all too prev- 
alent. 

The distinguished hand-writing expert, Mr. Al- 
bert H. Hamilton, rates suggestion carried by mov- 
ing pictures "the most prolific cause of the growth 
of crime." He pursues: "The lurid motion pic- 
tures are the dime novels brought to life. I know 
from cases I have handled and personal experiences 
I have had, that the stories of crime produced in the 
film works on the emotional natures of a large class 
of young people and incite them to crime. / have 
traced crime directly to the 'movie* m many cases. 
The present censorship doesn't amount to a row of 
pins. I have purposely visited many of the motion 
picture theatres to try to ascertain if there was 
ever a reel without at least one crime picture in it, 
and I have rarely found one without some sugges- 
tion of crime in it." 

Few would differ with Mr. Hamilton did he declare 
the determining influence to anti-social acts of the 
class of pictures he indicates on the intrinsic mock- 
heroic, the weak-willed, the crime-tainted in blood, 
and those in whom the call of sex is abnormally 
strong. Then there are the gradations of varied 
appeal in the picture, to one or more of which the 
perfectly normal individual will react more or less, 
even while he shunts them to the subliminal and 
holds them there. 



70 Stop Thief 

While an hypothesis may be framed to serve false- 
hood, certain combinations of words cannot be 
shaken from the shoes of Truth. The phrase, "Mod- 
eration in all things," is one of them; indeed, it is 
the particular slogan which every individual who 
would help the imprisoned wayward mend their ways, 
should pin in his hat. The mere pinning will not 
alter the attitude of the rough-and-tumble guard 
toward the prisoner, neither will it clear the mushy 
brain of the man-child of emotional by-products; 
but it might lead both to dig for and ponder facts, 
such as that history holds about equally for the 
hatefulest of wrongs visited by man upon his fel- 
lowman, those who were marked with moral scars, 
and those who wrought believing themselves to have 
been the direct agents of Deity. 

To whom pinning and digging does not appeal, 
current history will remind that naught restrained 
men from waging war on women and babes this 
nearly two-thousandth year of our Lord; men who 
in the same breath affected to break bread with the 
Christ. 

Conversely, it seems clear enough that, when not 
entirely lacking, the emotional balance wheels of 
Bunthornes of reform are geared dangerously high. 
Certain it is that those individuals base their efforts 
for prisoners on effusions such as that "The history 
of human progress is the history of expressed emo- 
tion." 



Crime by Suggestion 71 

Is it now? It is not true that much of the history 
of human progress resides in the history of repressed 
emotion ? 

Does not the average graduate of the pasture loti 
gather there that he advances human progress when 
he expresses emotion rightly, and retards it when he 
expresses it wrongly? How about it, shall he have 
expressed emotion with vile oaths which carried to 
the ears of kids and comrades? 

Did Newton express naught but emotion during 
the drab, dragging years through which he labored 
to lick the lie out of his figures ? 

Was all rooted in emotion which enabled Isabel of 
Castile to heal Spain of her running sore of law- 
lessness? Did not that national condition come 
largely of piling emotional license upon emotional 
license until "In the streets of Seville robbery, arson, 
rape and murder were hourly occurrences during the 
daylight hours" ? When the great queen had restored 
her country to respect in the family of nations, was 
it not out of the emotional side of her dual nature 
that she sought to violate individual conscience? 

What was the suggestive result of the nude dance 
on the morals of the women of ancient Sparta? 

Strip Waterloo of ifs, consider certain of the 
emotional uses Napoleon had made of himself prior 
to June 18, 1815, and have you not one deep- 
seated reason for his crushing defeat on that field? 
And by the way, the Cuirassiers of the Guard were 



72 Stop Thief 

not swept into the "sunken road of Ohaine" and 
by their mounts mangled there, as so graphically de- 
scribed by Hugo in Les Miserables. The "Ohaine 
Gap" had little to do with the initial reverses suf- 
fered by Napoleon's matchless dragoon cavalry at 
Waterloo. So much is taken out of "the hand of 
God," where Hugo placed it, and given over to the 
melodramatic discard. The point is that the melo- 
dramatic discard condemns a dishonest myth of the 
imagination, shorn of the meaning of which bruised 
France limped along very well while Hugo was dis- 
honoring his word, his just debts, and the law of 
contract of his land. And that alloy in the metal of 
a man who baited and belittled honest agents of the 
law, while he exclaimed incongruously, "There are 
no trivial things in life!" 

What to do with crime by suggestion have the 
immediately preceding paragraphs ? The broad an- 
swer is by the counter query, — what of emotion; 
wrongly expressed has not to do with crime by sug- 
gestion? The specific reply tells that no single- 
seeing extremist is fit to suggest his overdrawn line 
of thought to prisoners whose complex needs are 
variable with their moods. 

The prescribed field for the ultra-emotionalist 
who sees reform endeavor through a monocular lens, 
should be the free-life kindergarten. There, he 
could suggest baby-play without regard for any 
other finite thing; there, his false, flabby catch- 



Crime by Suggestion 73 

phrase wouldn't be understood; there, his maudlin 
makeshifts would meal nicely in the minds of the 
ingenuous, whom to amuse is to bless ; and yet, even 
there he could observe the brazen-faced, mock- 
emotional liar, so branded at birth. 

Hap the grown-up liar lands in prison, by then 
he probably will have molted all but the last feather 
of truth. Still, he can convince blinkered sentimen- 
talists that the Appian Way to reformation leads 
from allegations passed to them sub-rosa by ha- 
bitual felons and liars; free-lances in free life and 
punters in prison, whose underlying grievance is 
aimed, not, as they assert, at prison methods and 
prison officials, but at society as a whole, because 
society will not allow them to ride rough-shod. 

More of masked suggestion of the indirect variety 
is that which prompts criminals to induce the pur- 
blind to press for prison conditions analogous to 
those which obtained in the old-time volunteer hose- 
house, where the habitue willed to run or not to run 
to rope. Having brought about institutional in- 
harmony and inefficiency, sellers and sold thrash 
about setting the prison stage so that the ensemble 
will suggest to the layman that Justice a'tossing 
pardons to those whom she had so grossly persecuted 
is the one image lacking to make the scene perfect. 

Those serious in desire to probe to the back of 
the heads of criminals who are always on edge to 
blame one or another limb of the law for their bat- 



74 Stop Thief 

tered social standing: essentially, those who would 
know of prison-acquired tenderness at the seat of 
egoism in those heads, and how easy it is to sit down 
on the seat, need not turn prisons topsy-turvy to 
do it. Any metropolitan daily will enlighten them, 
almost any day, along the line of this excerpt from 
the New York Times: 

"New Monmouth, N. J., 

"October 9. 

"The report of a shotgun discharged shortly after 
one o'clock this morning, aroused the whole neigh- 
borhood of the house occupied by Miss Nettie Wal- 
ling and two maiden sisters whose ages range from 
fifty to seventy years. The sound had come from 
the Walling house. Upstairs the sisters were scream- 
ing, shrilly and in chorus: 

" 'We've got a burglar ! Help ! We've got a 
burglar !' 

"And audibly only when the women paused briefly 
for breath, came the cries of a man in great fear, 
calling: 'Yes, come, and get me. Yes, come and 
get me. They've got a gun. Come and get me.' 
Outside the men (of the neighborhood who had as- 
sembled) called again and again. Inside the women 
shrieked and the burglar called for help. At last 
they broke down the door and a dozen men rushed 
inside. There, crouched between the wreck of a 
window in the hall, was the burglar. Opposite him 



Crime by Suggestion 75 

stood Miss Nettie, the muzzle of a shotgun which 
she held, wavering and wabbling but pointing in the 
general direction of the frightened man." 

" 'Thank heaven, 5 murmured the burglar, as some- 
one grabbed the gun and others grabbed him. Then 
Reproachfully, 'She shot at me with one barrel, and 
it's a mercy she didn't kill me. The charge went 
through the window over my head. And I wasn't 
ftom 9 any thin' only siartdiri like she told me! 9 

"Miss Nettie had surprised the burglar in the 
hall, and had kept the gun pointed at him while she 
and her sisters screamed for help — the sisters too 
frightened to leave their bedroom. 4 I didn't aim to 
shoot the man,' declared Miss Nettie. 'This pesky 
thing just sort of went off by itself, and anyway it 
didn't hurt him.' " 

"And anyway," as Miss Nettie had it, you may 
scrape with a fine^tooth comb and not get evidence 
more pat to our points than are the above under- 
scored words. He, gun-hung, "wasn't doin' any- 
thin'," — but calculating to rob old ladies whom he 
thought defenseless. 

Every man who has done anything worth while 
for criminals has had to pass through a peculiar 
transitional process. Many of the self-obsessed 
have peddled it to the public that the process is "a 
hardening process." The man himself knows it to 
have been an infiltration of wisdom wrung out of 
unchangeable fact backed by immutable law. He 
knows, too, he took somewhat of oozing in and ooz- 



76 Stop Thief 

ing out before it struck in that it was up to him 
to do, not as he would like, but as he should. Ar- 
rived at that conclusion, he was a more useful in- 
strument, with a deepened sense of pity and obliga- 
tion. Shrive, deprive or punish, he understood at 
last that his first duty to the subject whose destiny 
he must in measure point, was to understand. Crim- 
inologists who have been pestled in that crucible, 
understand : 

(1) That a correctional institution is as the 
lengthening shadow of the man at its head. 

(2) That the man can't cast a perfect shadow, 
since "There's a crack in everything God makes." 
But that if the man is so big you have to strain 
to see the crack, he is well placed; and that if the 
crack is so big you have to squint to see the man, a 
reform institution is the last place on earth for 
him. He will suggest there more of the oblique in 
a week than his executive staff can straighten out 
in a year. 

(3) That all but the last iota of querulous com- 
plaint made by criminal rounders is grossly exag- 
gerated, when it is not made of dream stuff; and 
then when it carries tissue of truth, it is given over 
to those high in authority for no good purpose. 
More: that the agitator nearly always has a hand 
in initiating the trouble he reports. 

(4) That the appointments of many of the pris- 
oners of the State are an offense against humanism ; 



Crime by Suggestion 77 

just as it is at once an offense against fair play 
and crime-breeding, for self-seekers to charge prac- 
tical penologists with blame for conditions which 
they know the latter have time and again asked 
state legislators to ameliorate. All of untruth is, 
in the end, reactive. Nothing is gained for the crim- 
inal through calling false turns. 

(5) That if melodrama tists of reform continue to 
have their way, prison conditions will reduce to the 
level epitomized in this fruitful exhibit: 

"This is some joint. No work, plenty of good 
eats, and a bum argument every minute. 31 

In view of the second, third and fourth counts, 
the emphasis placed on the "some" is superfluous; 
but, 'tis pity that a master of the epigram should 
leave one laboring with his final phrase. Is it a 
gibe aimed at would-be mentors, or does it just refer 
to the usual dirty talk over dirty business? Prob- 
ably the latter hits it off. In any case, we venture 
the guess that the penman is a chronic officer- 
baiter. 

The extract was taken from a letter found on 
the person of one George Wilson who, with his "pal," 
Thomas Nolan, were old-time members of the noto- 
rious New York City "Whyho Gang." The two 
were under arrest for "assaulting and robbing a 
sailor in front of No. 9 Bowery." The letter was, 
from a prisoner then confined in an institution run 
ostensibly for the purpose of reform, for which tax- 



78 Stop Thief 

payers part with toil-earned dollars. It is easy to 
over-season a perfect broth, such as is the "ex- 
hibit" quoted, but, — what is suggested by it, and 
what had been suggested, in prison, to him who 
wrote it? 

(6) That it is beyond the length of man's cable- 
toe to fashion a frictionless machine with which to 
mill human imperfections. When such a machine is 
alleged, dig beneath the surface and disclose fateful 
faults divided about equally between those which are 
privative, and those which are nugatory. Suspect, 
even, are the conduct records of an institution that 
requires but indifferent results under free chatter 
for unskilled felons, — say nothing of the "no work, 
plenty of good eats, bum argument every minute," 
abomination. And it is of secondary significance as 
to whether or no the quoted words carry absolutely 
literal meaning; it is all-sufficient that they bespeak 
the spirit of endeavor in an atmosphere charged 
with the anti-social reactions of criminal malign- 
erers. 

A lamb-like spirit ostensibly may move the mass 
of inmates of such an institution; greetings may 
pass freely between officers and inmates, as greetings 
should, if they are manly, and are not gutter "guff" ; 
dress parade features may be painstakingly dressed ; 
slick, smooth, smirking "trusties," whom those of 
the submerged dub "ring guys," may convince open- 
mouthed visitors that the drifting policy was con- 



Crime by Suggestion 79 

ceived in prescience for twentieth-century prison 
application ; and sentimental architects of the struc- 
ture will affirm that so much as hint as to its 
narrowness of base to height, is out of "The School 
for Scandal." Yet: let local agents but attempt to 
give effective reformative direction to the work in 
hand, and the local disciplinarian will soon enough 
learn that certain prisoners distinguish keenly as be- 
tween prison activities which "ease them out 5 * of 
prison while they confirm criminousness, and activi- 
ties the aim of which is to leave the flippant floater 
excusable only unto himself. 

(7) That a rational prison regime represents 
symbolically a two-edged blade, one edge of which 
cuts as for the shrived thief on the Cross ; the other 
edge of the temper which moved the Christ-man to 
clear the tabernacle of money-changers; and that 
both edges should front him who would stuff minds 
with depraved ideas which already train oblique 
thought on action. 

The prison-worker may rest easy in his soul while 
he will have none of "pug-ugly" practice; nor of 
sexual suggestion; nor of dime-novel banalities on 
and off stage; nor of activities and inactivities that 
make of prison grounds places on which prisoners 
pass what they flippantly call "sleeping time," while 
they "work the place, 55 thresh out old villianies, and 
concoct new ones; nor of any method whatsoever 
which would turn over any part of a prison regime 



80 Stop Thief 

into the hands of convicted felons, and thereby by 
suggestion make the method, the State, and local 
agents alike ridiculous in the eyes of prisoners. 

Some who affect to see from the "hill of vision," 
will strip the writer of the last spiritual shred. Do- 
ing it, they will thrum that much-overworked, much- 
overrated, one-string, ofttimes out-of-tune tune, 
"The Personal Equation." 

The writer's answer is that he has had hundreds 
of letters, penned on nearly every sea and shore, 
from ex-prisoners who were doing well, and who 
ascribed that fact to efforts put forth for them by 
the writer; yet he reads in those letters mainly but 
the message courteous. When he shall have been 
tempted to arrogate unto himself credit which be- 
longs to the great big machines of which he repre- 
sented but one little cog, he will have been placed 
under the ban of ordinary horse sense. But, he has 
never, wittingly, sent forth a scintilla of false sug- 
gestion. 

"The darkest hour in any man's career is that 
wherein he fancies there is an easier way of gaining 
a dollar than by squarely earning it," said Horace 
Greeley, who must have held for no less as to refor- 
mation of character. To that, we may neither pad 
nor pelt a man. It will issue only out of his changed 
habit of thought and action, obtaining largely be- 
cause of efforts with and for him of men who sug- 
gest to him only what is beyond reproach ; men who 



Crime by Suggestion 81 

understand why it is that even so intangible a thing 
as sub-conscious suggestion, carried in a lowering 
sky, and tracing to pre-natal influence, may press 
upon a prisoner for execution of acts the rashest, 
while apparently motiveless. 

Summing up in the matter of crime by suggestion, 
tie to it that suggestion which initiates the doing, 
is frequently of far less import than suggestion pri- 
marily responsible for the leaving undone; as, for ex- 
ample, camouflage with a modicum of truth told, 
in order to conceal the bulk of truth withheld. 

Tie to it tightly that your miracle worker of re^ 
form, when not a mountebank pure and simple, is 
much too personal and singular ; for it is so written 
in a red record. 



CHAPTER in 

LAW MADE TO LIMP— JUDGES WHO 

HAVE JUDGED NOT— CLASS 

LEGISLATION 

This chapter is written under triple caption with 
little regard for closely-related sequence, because 
crime-breeding influences immediately named inter- 
lock singularly in the United States. 

Much of law-making and law-breaking in Amer- 
ica provokes to the kind of mirth that foreshadows 
impending disaster. When a people would joke 
national menace out of face, they are desperate, or 
they drift. 

The American people are prone to shunt ills in 
the body politic with a laugh, — and drift. They 
have drifted since they took over the national frame- 
work from the pioneer forefathers. They drifted 
into internecine slaughter of their most precious 
sons; into a colossal immigration policy never free 
of fateful features, ever miserably muddled; into 
petty war with Mexican brigands during a threat- 
ened break with Germany, owning not a single ap- 
proved airplane; and they drift into a constantly 
enlarging labyrinth of legal mandates, through the 

82 



Law Made to Limp 83 

meanderings of which the human mind may not pick 
its way. 

When the legal clue is as clear to the lay intellect 
as "Pigs is Pigs," it waits on the shifty juggler, 
who halts it with lurking technicalities, or plays 
upon spurious sentiment superinduced by a capri- 
cious public opinion expressed in the jury box. 

Frequently the legislative mandate ostensibly 
stalks big game with paragraphing baldly unconsti- 
tutional, or "jokerized," or so loosely assembled, as 
to be a joy unto the hair-splitting brain of the legal 
ferret. 

Even as to the national court of last resort, the 
lay mind bends grudgingly in reverence to legal 
authority divided against itself concerning moot 
points of constitutional law. What good, for ex- 
ample, is gained through publishing the minority 
counterviews of that court? Why not declare the 
majority edict and let it go at that? 

In any case, mention law to the layman and he 
is at once helped to the near synonym. Quibble 
is the word; quibble aimed cunningly at the unsus- 
pecting juryman, and brazenly at the reverent jus- 
tice to the limit of his professional patience. Nor 
code, case or place feazes the shyster trickster, who 
elects to pettifog the most of money out of, and 
moonshine into, an issue. It is further to be ex- 
pected that one who spurns the high call of his pro- 
fession will "work both sides of the street." 



84 Stop Thief 

Tainted practice of it has given a bad name to 
the law, common arraignment of which is that it is 
made to line the longest purse; and in so far as an 
attorney abets practical confiscation, he may not 
bow out participation with the smug claim that he 
serves his client. However, strictures of the kind 
unduly personify an instrument which functions as 
man makes it function. Out of leprous hands, even 
basic law deforms and destroys ; but being man-let- 
tered and executed, it is washed of accountability 
for bad government. 

The common law is but an enlargement of the 
Decalogue with detailed penalties attached; yet 
when and where it is inoperative in America, it is 
so very largely because avaristic frankensteins have 
been read into the body of statutory law to do the 
bidding of the money-mad. 

Thusly to bolt legal broth is no new resort of 
man. Always he has refused equity for a mixture 
into which he could ladle a base element that dena- 
tures equity. Avarice is about equally distributed 
in the human family. Hence, while refusing so much 
of law as is not made to serve them distinctively, 
and having learned too well their lesson from those 
to whom they paid tribute for so long, certain class- 
es of wage-earners knock hard and consecutively for 
legislation which, if put through, will garrote the 
gold-laying economic goose ; it will, because "Nature 
hates monopoly" and won't stand for it; won't for 



Lam Made to Limp 85 

the reason that it grounds to group imbecility which 
would disrupt the natural, economic balance. 

It seems not to have been borne in fully as yet 
upon either capital or labor that the economic tri- 
pod can not stand on two legs. At any rate, both 
still hold lightly the economic rights of interme- 
diate wage-earners, albeit they can wield the balance 
of power any time they see fit to act as a unit. 
And, sooth to say, salary dependents particularly 
have pretty nearly their fill of the two-pluck-one 
game. Lean picking all around under such a check 
would be worth while did it fix it in pelf-grooved 
minds that getting and holding, designed to kill off 
fellows financially, is certain, sooner or later, to pro- 
voke the last reprisal. 

Coming down to the manner in which penal law 
is made at one moment to serve the offense and the 
offender, and the next moment to exact the last 
ounce to the limit of its specifications, there can be 
but one opinion. Commonly, 'tis a far cry to jus- 
tice after a merry tilt with the absurd: as if com- 
mon sense had left a Pandora box of law in the 
keeping of Chance. 

On the one hand, it is prison for a harmless 
punter far hawking harmless verse. On the other 
hand, a Fein, notoriously known to be a XXX 
habitual criminal, is repeatedly and consecutively 
placed on probation, or paroled by hook or crook 
concerning brutal offenses against the person. The 



86 Stop Thief 

one, as yet unattached criminally, is ruthlessly 
dumped into the discard. The other, criminal 
rounder, is "protected" while making his rounds, 
until it was the facing of him and those of his kid- 
ney to the electric chair, or local law and order 
become a national joke; which goes to show how 
hard it is to stop the predatory parasite, once lax 
execution of law establishes him. 

"Dopey Benny" Fein's recorded criminal career 
reflects but a fraction of his anti-social flings, par- 
allel with those of thousands of criminals who cling 
to capital cities. Square that record with conclu- 
sions reached in our writings. Have in mind that 
Fein's confessions concerning his culminating activ- 
ities involved in serious crime, either as principals 
or accessories, nearly a hundred gangsters and 
members of labor unions. Then say if gentry who 
take to the bludgeon and bullet as a bird to bug 
can be trusted to influence the official acts of agents 
of the law? Particularly, say if prison regimes are 
rightly ordered which toady to sporting instincts 
that run to thuggism, indulge hankering after low- 
down amusement, aggravate result-killing mania 
for change and variety, and favor fulsomely the col- 
lective machinations of recidivistic felons, to the end 
that they may drift as drones on a prison tide that 
flows to the deep sea of criminal intent? 

In part, Fein's record: 

August 14, 1900: Convicted of petit larceny. 



Law Made to Limp 87 

Sentenced to the House of Refuge, Randall's Island. 
Prior to that date arrested twice, charged with steal- 
ing pocketbooks. Discharged both times, dates and 
reasons for discharges not appearing in the records. 

October 22, 1905: Assault and robbery. Held in 
$2,000 bail. Discharged on recommendation of the 
District Attorney. Observe the bail, for "assault 
and robbery. 55 

May 3, 1906: Arrested for grand larceny and 
sent to the New York State Reformatory by a judge 
who got illuminating light when the "talent 55 scooped 
his own silver. Record bad. Served but eighteen 
months. 

May 18, 1908: Arrested for jostling and fined 
$3. Pocket-picking attempt, no doubt. Note the 
fine in the face of Fein's former record. 

June, 1908: Arrested for assaulting a policeman. 
Convicted in Special Sessions and placed on proba- 
tion. If he could "jostle 55 for $3 in May, why not 
take a whack at a policeman in June, and leave the 
rest up to the court? 

August 6, 1908: Convicted of burglary and sen- 
tenced to three years and six months in Sing Sing. 
Sentence for Fein at this stage of his career should 
have been none other than indeterminate for an 
habitual criminal. 

May 23, 1912: Charged with grand larceny and 
discharged on recommendation of the District At- 
torney. 



88 Stop Thief 

June 20, 1913: Arrested for interfering with an 
officer. Flippant manifestation of contempt for the 
badge of authority. Sentence suspended. 

August 9, 1913: Arrested on a charge of felonious 
assault. Tried and convicted. Conviction reversed 
by the Appellate Division. 

September 16, 1913: Arrested for carrying a 
loaded revolver. Held in $5,000 bail. Indicted but 
never tried. 

October 7, 1913: Arrested in connection with the 
police investigation of the shooting of William Lus- 
tig. Discharged by a magistrate. 

December, 1914: Arrested in connection with the 
shooting of Frederick Straus. Discharged by the 
Coroner. And then, "the deluge," of course. 

Nature having cut Fein pronouncedly on the bias, 
and society having primed him, up through his boy- 
hood and young manhood, to express the cutting, 
it is probable that reformation was not possible for 
the adult Fein. Be that as it may, the last reforma- 
tive chance was lost to him in the fast-and-loose 
game agents of the law played with him imme- 
diately after his discharge from Sing Sing. 

Whether or no the after-prison life of Fein is 
charged with inexplicable immunity from prescrip- 
tions of the penal code, his record amounts to a 
bald bid on the part of society for nearly every 
successive step in crime he took. And clinch the 
fact that Fein's case is exceptional only as to law- 



Law Made to Limp 89 

lessness born of an uncommon depravity. The kind 
is more common to capital cities than are canary 
birds. 

The crucial consideration is this : Fein could have 
transferred his activities and, in the event of his 
arrest, he could have "covered" for sentence to a 
first-offense reform institution. Hence reformatories 
the country over house at least a minimum of habit- 
ual criminals; they also confine hundreds of lads 
who should have been given the benefit of probation, 
if anybody should, while required to make restitu- 
tion in the natural way. Such muddling makes the 
sentence contemptible in the minds of the sentenced, 
upheaves institutions through transfers made from 
one to the other to restore disrupted balances, sums 
up in waste for transportation and associated 
charges, places the one man where compensation 
for what he loses is impossible, the other where he 
can do the most harm ; and initiates the former and 
confirms the latter into permanent criminous selec- 
tion, thereby violating both preventive and deterrent 
measures for the protection of society, 

Magistrates must commit errors of sentence if 
criminal records are closed to them. A judge might 
be morally certain of criminal earmarks, and find 
no justification in law for an intuitive sentence; yet 
a sentence for crime can not cover unless it takes 
cognizance of the backward trail of the sentenced. 
Failing in that makes the sentence one of the weak- 



90 Stop Thief 

est links in the American chain of criminal juris- 
prudence. 

Therefore, there should be established a national 
clearing house of criminal identification. Through 
no other than such comprehensive means, executed 
with military thoroughness, can the criminal be 
searched out who is singularly motivated at once to 
change base, and to defeat local methods of identi- 
fication, often crude in inexpert hands. 

Scientific commitment of felons demands that 
committing magistrates shall have recourse to their 
completely-recorded criminal careers, else judges 
may not fit the law to the man, nor the man to 
the institution; moreover, obligation to sentence 
wisely would act as a check on the reading of penal 
law beyond its last hint of warrant. 

Then, in an institution for adult first-offenders 
one might not expect to interview two prisoners sen- 
tenced at the same time by the same judge, one of 
whom is an habitual under cover who hugs himself 
for having "put it over on the judge"; the other, 
a non-criminal first-offender who nurses an ugly 
grouch against the judge in particular and society 
in general because both "put it over on him with- 
out giving him a fair chance to square himself." 
Cases of the latter kind frequently issue out of sex- 
ual acts to which not an iota of criminal intent can 
be attached. They are pitifully mismanaged. Par- 



Law Made to Limp 91 

ents who allow their girls to head for red lights 
have no call to embitter the lives of young men who 
are challenged crassly to express the last impulse 
over which mature man gains dominion. 

Arraignment galore has been made of imposition 
of sentence on felonious offenders, but such stric- 
tures have failed to arrest public attention because 
they have been general in terms; whereas one can 
not shunt specific kernels fed into the prison paper, 
Star of Hope, by Cons. No. 57,355 of Sing Sing. 
Under the caption, "Some Inequalities in the Crim- 
inal Law," the editor, understood to be an ex- 
lawyer, puts it substantially as given in the follow- 
ing summary, based on his dig into the prison 
records : 

(1) A banker who stole $150,000 received a sen- 
tence of one year. "An unfortunate with no politi- 
cal backing forged a check for $38 and got twelve 
years." 

(2) "A lawyer deliberately robbed a widow and 
orphans of $35,000 and was sentenced for one 
year. 55 A chauffeur took his employer^ automobile 
out for a "joy ride, 55 and got a year and six months. 
Details of the "ride 55 governing the sentence were 
deleted, but they would scarcely remove all of the 
odium of contrast. 

(3) A man with twelve previous convictions for 
felonious crime received a sentence of one year and 



92 Stop Thief 

eight months. About the same time, three men who 
had never before been convicted of crime were con- 
victed of burglary in the third degree and got from 
two and one-half to five years. 

(4) As to twenty first offenders and twenty-seven 
third offenders, all committed for burglary, the in- 
vestigator found that the average sentence for the 
third offenders was two months shorter than for 
the men who had previously committed misdemean- 
ors, but who had not been convicted of felony. 

(5) One judge sentenced six prisoners for first- 
degree larceny. To four he gave sentences of two 
years and six months, to another two years, and to 
another three years and six months. Another judge 
who sentenced six men for the same offense gave 
five a sentence of five years, and one a sentence of 
two years and six months, an average of four years 
and seven months. In relation thereto, Cons. No. 
57,355 asks: "Can it be possible that five-sixths of 
the offenders who appeared before one judge for 
this offense were twice as guilty as five-sixths of 
those who appeared before the other judge?" 

(6) Ninety men, all first offenders, and all com- 
mitted for robbery first degree, were sent to Sing 
Sing by nineteen judges. Seven judges sentenced 
fifty-six of the ninety prisoners. One of the judges 
gave the lowest average sentence of four years, eight 
months and ten days. Another judge gave the high- 
est average sentence of nine years. The other judges 



Lam Made to Limp 93 

gave varying sentences ranging between the extremes 
given. 

The critic further comments: "There is no way 
at present in this State (New York) of correcting 
a sentence when it is unjust and inequitable by rea- 
son of its extreme severity, except by appeal to 
executive clemency. In a civil case the Appellate 
Court will reduce an excessive verdict; it never re- 
duces an excessive sentence. Our judges are auto- 
crats, except within very wide limits, in determining 
what time the convicted man may spend in prison. 
They generally err, and the result of their errors 
is un justice that blocks, as nothing else could, the 
wheels of prison reform, and makes demons of some 
who have in them the stuff of which good citizens 
are made," 

Two main reasons tell why whole-swallowing of 
indictment by convicted felons of legal machinery 
does not promote full digestion of the truth: (1) 
The criminal is commonly a self-seeking egoist who 
sees with a single and criminal eye. (2) Cardinal 
facts which frequently decide judges for or against 
clemency are not written into commitment papers, 
and they should not be so long as prisoner book- 
keepers are allowed to diffuse the free-life records 
of prisoners among fellow prisoners. But the pri- 
vate file of the warden should contain every capital 
circumstance that bears upon either clemency or 
severity of a sentence. When such inside informa- 



94 Stop Thief 

tion can be used only to strengthen the reformative 
grasp of legalized agents, judges will no doubt give 
it. 

While no prisoner should have access even to the 
prison records of prisoners, serious objection is 
wanting to Cons. No. 57,355's brief; albeit the cen- 
sor slips cogs where he fails to parallel criminals 
and their crimes, and leaves one with the suspicion 
that the "lawyer" could not resist temptation to 
conceal such as the probable fact that his $38 
forgerer was an habitual criminal clamped to a 
crooked pen. Discount by so much and apparently 
there is no defense of a one-year sentence for a 
$150,000 thief. The same sentence for one who dis- 
possessed "a widow and orphans" was scandalous 
perversion of law of the particular kind that motives 
criminals and sends them sneeringly on their way; 
but the writer happens to know that the thieving 
was not done "deliberately." 

Anyway, there are legal, ethical, and reformative 
reasons, sound ones, why a court of review should 
give no greater heed in law to the decision of a 
lower criminal court than to the edict of a lower 
civic court. It is most important to correct injus- 
tice, concerning which a careful study of the data 
given fixes the impression that the swing of the 
pendulum of sentence was subject to influences for- 
eign to the question of equity. 

Scores of cases canvassed by the writer during 



Law Made to Limp 95 

his three decades of correctional service attest the 
truth of Cons. No. 57,355's closing count. Beyond 
dispute, much of legal disposition alike of the in- 
stinctive and of the circumstantial felon, markedly 
confirms the one in, and overwhelms the other into, 
a life of crime. That is one of the far-reaching 
tributes levied upon society by latitude which allows 
judges to run amuck with singular ideas of social 
solidarity, and so defeat prevention here through 
the exercise of undue severity, and arrest deterrence 
there by false clemency. The victim of the one may 
take on initial criminous intent when he compares 
notes with the beneficiary of the other. Charged as 
he is with responsibility to read law framed to serve 
equal justice, it is clearly the duty of a judge to 
avoid deadlines of disposition. Judges would not 
take first false steps if they would but realize that 
the common mind, expressed in criminal law, to a 
common end, is more safe for common guidance 
than an uncommon ego given over to uncommon ex- 
pression. 

On the other hand, the dead level usually denotes 
stagnation. Since change is the order of the uni- 
verse, inelastic law would not fit. Yet far better 
would it be for all concerned if it should be made 
mandatory upon judges to pass sentence in accord- 
ance with legal prescriptions fitted to each degree 
of felonious crime, than that social progress should 
be held up from motives such as seem to be so plainly 



96 Stop Thief 

readable in the summary struck off by No. 57,355. 

While the trader does not confine to petty courts 
his shifts for the social flotsam and jetsam, the 
huckstering judge is a comparatively negligible 
quantity. 

The plague of equity by edict is the super-senti- 
mental agitator first, and judge afterwards, who 
is struck with social astigmatism. Him inscrutable 
Nature fits with mental lenses which preclude his 
clear sociologic vision, save over transverse lines 
whose focal point centers on the universally accepted 
fact that it is a pity the criminal is. For the rest, 
look for him to draw to and from reformative con- 
clusions which cross-match plain horse sense piled 
out of the cumulative experience of mankind. Hence 
his misuse of the suspended sentence, and of proba- 
tion, and hence, appreciably, the habitual criminal 
rounder who "hugs himself for having put it over 
on the judge," and who would further play 'possum 
with the puseyistic advertiser within prison walls, 
for whom it is a dull day when his name does not 
appear in print. 

It is germane to add that genuine criminologists 
are not given to the "newspaper habit." Men who 
engage wholly for criminals in accordance with their 
nature and needs have no time to truck with the 
press agent. "Self-praise stinks," not only; peno- 
logically speaking, it is the measure of a man who 
rushes to type with tinsel. The tragedy of it con- 



Lam Made to Limp 97 

sists in the fact that the public will not trouble to 
try to read the man in the type. 

Second in the irrational running is the coldly 
aloof, painfully just judge who is legally hidebound. 
He must know that much of first-offense crime is 
due primarily to open houses of temptation at which 
society sneezes ; and secondarily to the vilest of 
sporting houses and crookedest of gaming houses 
which society won't close and keep closed, together 
with the lamest of laws which society frames. It 
matters not. Neither does it count that judicious 
elasticity presupposes execution of law in accord- 
ance with material conditions, human intentions, 
and human limitations. Nor will he consider that 
he would be "reversed" forever after rather than 
that his own last lapse should be spread upon a 
"movie" screen. Ignoring all, he will crank his offi- 
cial dignity and serve the limit to a first-offending 
lad whose heart then and there bleeds with remorse 
over an act foreign to his better nature. So, judges 
whom the ermine but drapes can and do "make 
demons of young men in whom is the stuff of which 
good citizens are made." 

On whomever responsibility rests for present 
sport-charged, patch-quilt prison methods, judges 
who have subscribed to those methods perforce of 
their official acts may not escape the final reckon- 
ing. The reckoning will ensue closely upon the 
clean-up following the World War. With prices, 



98 Stop Thief 

the unskilled ex-felon will then be forced to his nor- 
mal level. The varied exactions of closely-drawn 
industry will then classify and crowd him out, just 
as closely-drawn industry has done always, and al- 
ways must; for human progress does not halt for 
the ill-equipped, however well-intentioned they may 
be. 

Then, public opinion, awakened if through no 
other agency than a thinning purse, will want to 
know why judges who presumably were immersed 
in penal law, the which is as the right arm of ap- 
plied penology, allowed themselves to be gulled by 
not so much as a specious veneer of penological 
experience, knowledge, or foresight. Prisonward 
again will then tread a host of prison-pampered, 
industry-cheated ex-prisoners, amelioration of whose 
plight society had trusted to blindly-egoistic dilet- 
tantism. Come that time, society, society-like, will 
meanly shift the blame from its own to the shoulders 
of a few, whose fallacies of reform it was society*s 
duty at all times to countercheck. 

In the chapter herein on Prison Methods we shall 
enlarge upon the near imbecility of measures that 
serve by and large to establish the criminal, while 
they breed contempt in him at bottom for the meas- 
ures. Example: "Ten years?" recently echoed a 
young Apache when sentenced by Justice George 
McCann of the Supreme Court of the State of New 
York for manslaughter, the which many judged to 



Lam Made to Lvmp 99 

have been brutal murder. "Huh! I could do ten 
years standin' on me head!" 

A society-indulged homicide would not have 
snapped that snarl into the very face of the law, 
had his sentence read to a federal prison instead of 
to a prison in which he figured to wear a boiled shirt 
and browse; yet Uncle Sam's houses of correction 
are fast assuming the lead in measures of reform 
that are sane while humanitarian. 

Society itself is responsible for the amount and 
kind of law it attempts to enforce. During the last 
half decade the State Legislatures have added ap- 
proximately seventy-five thousand statutory laws to 
hundreds of thousands of laws in force. The corol- 
lary that a mass of written matter requiring some- 
thing like sixty-five thousand reams of legal cap 
must further complicate complexities cannot be es- 
caped; nor can it be gainsaid that such wholesale 
attempts at legislating social solidarity engender 
del^y and chicanery all along the legal line, while 
they tend rather to arrest than to develop indi- 
vidual sense of social obligation. That is a sense 
the average man will have acquired out of the sum 
of his environment and bringing up through the 
plastic years, with the emphasis on the guarded 
word and act in the home circle. Thereafter the 
appeal is to settled habit, and settled habit bends 
grudgingly to opposed exactions of artificial law. 

As to kind, take a capital case in point: Just 



100 Stop Thief 

at the time when "terrorism" was the secretly-or- 
dained policy of certain of the leaders of certain 
branches of organized labor; when arson, riot en- 
tailing wholesale destruction of property, and vio- 
lence against the person capped by brutally-planned 
murder by the bomb, issued freely the country over 
in pursuance of that policy, just then supreme legal 
sanction was given the "picket line." 

Being potentially the foster brother of riot but 
a half-step removed from anarchy; and being a 
brazen bid for various forms of duress that menace 
social stability, the picket line was the last club 
which should have been placed in the hands of any 
class of citizens. Given over to the alien mob, the 
picket line is the gravest menace that carries the 
ukase of constitutional law. Out of its very nature 
it leads to law-breaking. 

Inviolability of the person of a law-abiding citi- 
zen is the enacting text of the Constitution. When 
the basic power back of any form of government 
does not make short shift of such as human brutes 
who dig their heels into the faces of fellow workmen 
because the latter would make an honest living where 
and how they choose, it carries of majesty no more 
than does the flouted function; and of service that 
comparable with the atrophying muscle. 

It is rankest legal burlesque that leaves unscathed 
the instigators of picket line brutalities which 
amount to the most ominous of social crimes, and 



Lam Madd to Limp 101 

visits but nominal fines, paid out of union funds, 
upon a few scapegoat perpetrators. It is also vital 
that the foreign-born, to thousands of whom force 
is a natural weapon, are egged on to acts of violence 
by native-born thugs whom murder does not feaze, 
while they get expressed exactly that for which they 
curse "capitalism.' 5 

It is acutely up to the incoming administration 
to give it out, unequivocally, that government by 
the ruling few with the likes of the bludgeon shall 
not take root on American soil. 

Under constantly changing conditions interna- 
tionally interactive, much of legal lore will take on 
added elasticity. Human progress may or may not 
exactly parallel the more incidental articles writ- 
ten even into organic law. But since certain of 
human attributes and predilections do not keep pace 
with changing codes and conditions, they must be 
made to square with the plummet of unchanging 
constitutional law, else the instrument yields of its 
essence, and a people of their distinctively autono- 
mous character. Hence the vital menace contained 
in the fact that the wage-earner who would work 
in America under conditions satisfactory to himself, 
runs about an even chance of "getting his face 
kicked in." 

Just so much of anarchism fetters freedom and 
links to endless reprisal, not to mention by-products 
pregnant in manifestations which make for the crim- 



102 Stop Thief 

inal, and for social chaos, as witness the following 
excerpts from the confession of gangster William 
Reiger before a grand jury of the County of New 
York: 

"I was a manager of prize fights when they picked 
me up. Abe Salkin, who was a genuine furrier and 
chairman of the picket committee, hired me. He 
took me into a picket's room, a secret room in 
Astoria Hall that had a guard on the door so no- 
body could come in but pickets. Mangulies, another 
boss of the union (furriers) told us we could beat 
up anybody when policemen were around because 
the police were taken care of. Anyhow, I was never 
arrested in all my strong-arm work. The usual way 
was for one of us to stand in front of the union 
headquarters. Then we would get a wave of the 
arm upstairs. We got the man, knocked him down, 
kicked him in the face if we could, and left him 
where he fell. I beat up six men, myself, right in 
front of union headquarters. 

"A Greek came down, and a union official, who 
walked with him, raised his hand. That was the sig- 
nal for us, and I laid on the finishing touches till 
they had to carry him away. The man who walked 
with the Greek is the man who goes to court and 
pays the fine every time a union man is found guilty 
of anything and sentenced to pay a fine. 

"Before I started to beat up the Greek I saw a 
union official walk over to a policeman and I saw 



Lam Made to Limp 103 

the policeman walk around the corner till after the 
work was done. We left the man bleeding at the 
ears and mouth. The boss's secretary, Weisberger, 
said: 'AH right, Billie, that was good work. 5 

"I walked in front of Krantz and smashed him 
on the jaw, knocking out a couple of teeth. Then 
I hit him again and blacked his eye. Weisberger, 
the secretary, was there, and ran after him with 
other strikers. Mangulies, the boss of the pickets, 
said to the other strong-arm men, 'Billie (meaning 
me) give it to him, but I want you fellows to give 
him more so that he won't be able to work/ 9f 

Reiger's testimony dovetailed into that of many 
other "starkers," one of whom confessed : "A police- 
man who left the force for that special purpose 
handled the money as a go-between for the gang- 
sters. They were told, when sent out to beat up 
people, they must always look to see that the ex- 
policeman was around, and that if he was to be seen 
it meant that the coast was clear and that no police- 
man would respond to the victim's cries for help, no 
matter how brutally the thugs might handle him. 
Men were beaten into insensibility in crowded streets 
while bystanders cried in vain for the police to 
come." (New York Times.) 

As if that were not ominous enough, read of con- 
sanguine manifestations, of which not a major city 
of the United States is entirely free: 

December 18th, 1915, Mayor William 'Hale 



104 Stop Thief 

Thompson began the clean-up of the police depart- 
ment of Chicago, concerning which the Mayor said: 
"I know the police department is absolutely rotten. 
It is honey-combed with grafters. I know criminals, 
hold-up men, murderers, pickpockets, and thieves of 
all description known to the police are walking the 
streets every day and are not arrested. This is a 
terrible thing to say, but I would not be surprised 
to learn that in the department are men who have 
planned murders." 

Whether or no any of the police of Chicago 
"planned" murders, battalions of them were reduced 
later to the use of repeating rifles to stop mur- 
derers. 

Later on, Mayor Thompson asked Chief of Police 
Healy for a bodyguard because of threats upon his 
life, made presumably in attempt to arrest his activ- 
ities in the campaign for the coming aldermanic pri- 
maries. One suspects that the menace ostensibly 
aimed at the Mayor politically was a blind to cover 
terrorism by laborites, acting in conjunction with 
certain members of a police department "honey- 
combed with grafters," who are appreciably respon- 
sible at bottom for conditions like this: 

Across the street from the West Thirtieth Street 
Police Station in New York City stands a twelve- 
story loft building tenanted by fourteen manufac- 
turers of dress goods. At last accounts there were 
only three of those tenants who had not complained 



Law Made to Limp 105 

to the police about robberies. One loft had been 
robbed four times, others had suffered three losses. 
Patrolmen in uniform pass in Thirtieth Street all 
night. One of these robberies was a $3,000 haul of 
silks, lowered per elevator from an upper loft. Ap- 
parently the same set of burglars had been robbing 
the building for two years. They knew where the 
electric switches were and turned the lights on 
brazenly. 

Said one of the victims : "What is the use of com- 
plaining to the police? On several occasions my firm 
found it necessary to send out goods late at night 
so as to make connections with European steamers. 
Trucks took away the goods, a dozen patrolmen 
passed, yet though I stood near the street entrance 
not one ever stopped me. The police don't appear 
to want to see what is going on." 

Put the finishing touch to the tale in the manner 
in which occasionally-apprehended midnight marau- 
ders are encouraged to play upon the oblique sym- 
pathies of maudlin meddlers, to the end that reform 
atmosphere shall be redolent of that of the cigarette- 
soaked, gutter-snipe, gambling-charged poolroom, — 
then answer; and then garnish the answer with pro- 
cedure like that at a recent Brooklyn, N. Y., trial, 
involving a violation of infantile paralysis regula- 
tions : 

Two well-known medical men of the city health 
department testified as to the guilt of the defendant, 



106 Stop Thief 

whom the presiding judge discharged on the ground 
of the doubtful qualifications of the physicians. 
"You asked the doctors if they were doctors," said 
the magistrate to the prosecutor, "and they said 
they were. That is all I know about them. There 
are many varieties of doctors." There are, and the 
"alienists" among them who will line their purses 
on either side of a hypothetical question, bank on 
the legal meanderings of judges afflicted with micro- 
scopic asininity. So do reformers who image all of 
reformation as dead and cold which does not func- 
tion as with the reverse wheels of their minds. 

State the above case to a bootblack, and he will 
bite it off quickly in the vernacular of the curb that 
the crux of the question had to do severely with 
violation of municipal law, and with the vindication 
of diplomas only in the matter of emphasis. Being 
intelligent, he would, could one imagine him presid- 
ing, further sit to hear clearly-established medical 
authority before closing a case leading to and from 
the door of death. 

Hair-splitting pettifoggery should have been ban- 
ished long ago from our primary courts. When em- 
ployed by trial judges to achieve triumph over man- 
dates basic to the commonweal, it stretches to the 
limit the patience of a people long-ridden by thinly- 
spun legal verbiage. It also emboldens the glow- 
worm of reform to insist upon the all-embracing ra- 
diance of his wee bit of a flash. 



Lam Made to Limp 107 

The people of the State of New York, represented 
in joint committee of the State Bar Association of 
the Chamber of Commerce of the City of New York, 
are about to close formulation of a set of "simple 
rules," one aim of which will be to "establish a Board 
of Arbitration to which the parties in a business 
controversy would consent to submit their grievances 
with the understanding that they would abide by 
the decision." 

That will be an excellent beginning provided that, 
in conformity with the English referee system, the 
party which shall refuse such arbitration and then 
fail to establish claim under further process of law 
shall stand charged with his opponent's costs. It 
is assumed the conclusions of the committee will 
carry recommendations for that mandatory imposi- 
tion; and in that faulty, spineless law makes for 
feverish business, feverish business for idleness, and 
idleness for crime, it is further assumed that the 
committee contemplate secondary agitation for 
common-sense wording and enforcement of criminal 
law up through its gamut. Otherwise, the odds will 
remain nearly prohibitive against the apprehension, 
the conviction, and other than the "fake" reforma- 
tion of the predal felon. 

The law being the same, while temptation to pil- 
fer from the government is aggravated by many 
singular factors, the result tells indubitably that 
the rampant criminal in America is due largely to 



108 Stop Thief 

the difference in the manner in which the law is en- 
forced, in and out of prison, by Uncle Sam on the 
one hand, and on the other hand by the States and 
localities. The government gets the larger result 
because both as to the wording and execution of 
criminal law, it follows the line of cleavage indicated 
by William P. Borland of the State Bar Commit- 
tee, who puts it substantially in this: 

"It is noted that seventy-five per cent of the 
litigation relating to wills concerns the meaning 
and legal effect of the instrument. This is largely 
a question of construction. In my judgment a very 
large amount of this litigation is preventable. In 
fact, it (construction) is the vital reform on this 
subject. Only certain clear-cut and definite estates 
should be permitted to be created by will, and the 
intention of the testator should be drawn from the 
legal effect of his language rather than from the 
accidental choice of words." Obviously, that idea 
should be serviceable throughout the legal divisions ; 
and so, concretely as to twistable language which is 
insinuated into, and conflicts which ensue upon, am- 
biguously-worded law in general, paraphrase Mr. 
Borland's contention and make it read: "The inten- 
tion of the instrument should be drawn from the 
legal effect of its language, rather than from the 
choice of words, 'accidental, 5 or otherwise, contained 
in the instrument. 55 

Beyond that, and before a bill either state or 



Lam Mada to Limp 109 

national in scope is submitted for final reading in 
the house of its birth, pass it through the hands of 
the Attorney General having jurisdiction for 
amendment which shall leave it consonant with Con- 
stitutional diction. Still further pass up per the 
Attorney General to the Supreme Court of the 
United States questions of individual and collective 
rights included within the proposed legislation, 
which that court only can interpret finally. 

Objections against such procedure will not be 
wanting. Among other things, it will be alleged that 
it would mark a revolutionary change which would 
unduly affect the functions and boundaries of efforts 
of Attorneys General and Justices of the Supreme 
Court; hold up much-needed legislation; make the 
operation of legal machinery cumbersome; mix the 
legal broth; and impose onerous duties on public 
servants. 

The sufficient categorical answer is : 

(1) Nothing short of like revolutionary changes 
will meet exactions which call for adjustment with- 
out cavil beyond much of legal custom and bound- 
ary; custom and boundary largely arbitrary and 
by no means in accord with the country's j>resent 
needs. 

(2) Be it never so "much-needed, 55 legislation 
does not legislate until it stands firmly in its legal 
shoes. The mass of the other kind would be killed 
a-borning, or, having been put through in the teeth 



110 Stop Thief 

of its declared spuriousness, the public would there- 
by get a stranglehold on those responsible for it, 

(3) Since the method of approach to the Supreme 
Court would be cleared of successive holdups; and 
since the duties imposed upon public servants would 
be continually lessening in the interests of fewer, 
clear-cut statutes, the last three counts do not 
weigh, as against the end to be served. 

(4) Prevention of the kind of law that makes for 
crime is the logical first step in the prevention of 
crime. 

(5) There is no good reason why the legal ma- 
chinery of the state and nation should not co- 
operate, nor why any part of it should be clogged 
by doubtfully-worded legislation. Furthermore, 
that man is unfit to help direct the legal life of a 
people arrived at a vital transitional stage of de- 
velopment who does not elect to yield somewhat of 
all but conviction to do it. And even conviction may 
be fully sane against a given form of human expres- 
sion and fail to hold the individual wholly safe from 
lapse which takes on that form. Hence the hand of 
avarice still lies heavily on the progeny of those 
who knelt nearly twenty centuries ago at Christian 
altars; and hence much of human grind goes on in 
response to the spur of various kinds and degrees 
of covetousness originally proscribed in stone-struck 
precepts. 

The scramble to wield unmoral money power ap- 



Lam Madd to Limp 111 

proaches closest to mania in freest America just be- 
cause intrinsic individual expression is held there 
under the least of any kind of restraint. It follows 
naturally that the trend is to legislate indefensible 
inequities. Thus is established the primary sequence 
by which America comes into the bulk of her "high- 
brow" moral criminals; and secondarily by legions 
of felons of the "low-brow" grade, who, forced re- 
peatedly to the economic wall, throw up the sponge 
in discouraged disgust and fall back instinctively 
upon the caveman's working tools. Many will pooh- 
pooh the latter lead; many who can not feel resent- 
ment with the crowded-out derelict who plugs for 
pennies while he listens to the pur of a "Packard 
Six." 

The types of men named are analogous in so far 
as they yield to atavistic pressure. The one, the 
more finished, legalized social bandit, harks back to 
the toll-taking lord of the baronial keep; the other, 
the anti-social by-product of unsocial circumstance, 
commonly images the prowling, self -justifying 
poacher of the middle ages, whom keeper, gun and 
dogs could not clear of the closed preserve. 

A country may be free of current responsibility 
for certain of its morbid victims of hereditary trans- 
mission, the which frequently strikes through unto 
the fifth generation. Your neurotic, erratic erotic, 
for example, will issue under the best possible form 
and function of government. The Master Mind has 



112 Stop Thief 

yet to yield into the hands of man the master key to 
the process-of-elimination puzzle. But it is not so 
as to the two types of men under consideration ; two 
types that have always ridden the tiring nation to 
its last gasp. In America they are products in part 
of a very positive parental bias which anchors lads 
and lassies to the belief that money-getting, rather 
than character-building, is the desideratum of life. 

The latter idea looms large in a review in Every- 
body's November, 1916, number, by Richard Le Gal- 
lienne, himself an American by adoption, who cuts 
to the bone of our national nicks and needs. Under 
the caption "What is an American?" Mr. LeGal- 
lienne relates how "a lady friend interested in the 
future of the American ideal" took it upon herself 
to gather first-hand information thereof. She ques- 
tioned "some thousands of boys" homeward bound 
from public schools, and found "the prevalent idea 
in these young minds was that an American was one 
who made much money and made it fast." 

Mr. Le Gallienne submits that "these schoolboys 
did not, of course, evolve this idea of themselves. 
They must have caught it from their elders, and it 
would seem, too, that their school training must 
have been deficient in the inculcation of a noble 
nationalism which should go along with religion, as 
one of the first principles of the national education." 

Absolutely! But we turned such as the Twenty- 



Law Made to Limp 113 

third Psalm out of the public schools decades ago 
in order to lift alleged imposition from offended 
sects. Whether that procedure was wise or other- 
wise from the standpoint of fundamental American- 
ism is a question which was at least too lightly 
brushed aside by an unthinking, if generous, major- 
ity; but the act of yielding the highest of moral 
instruction without substituting synthetic indoc- 
trination of kind was palpably beyond defense, since 
all children belong to God. 

That stupid error accounts in marked measure 
for the average American-born lad of Protestant 
parentage stript in the same measure of reverence 
for reverential things, inclusive of Nature's laws and 
the laws of his land. Also, it tells largely why he 
is so prone to arrange material values in the reverse 
of their intrinsic order; and why so impatient of all 
of authority which would correct that alignment. 

Specifically considered, it is worse than Mr. 
Le Gallienne has it. The average American lad 
need not be helped to the "money-mania," nor to 
the banalities accruing therefrom; he can and does 
just naturally absorb both as he goes wherever he 
goes on American soil. He furthermore can and does 
just naturally absorb how best to be a wastrel of 
money and of potentiality to make good use of 
himself and of money's equivalents. All of it he is 
doing, mark you, during the plastic schooldays; 



114 Stop Thief 

during the most impressionable of days when he 
needs no urging along the wrong pike, nor to build 
the untoward influence into the bone he is making. 

What the native American lad of American par- 
entage does, few of his otherwise-classified compan- 
ions will leave wholly undone. Hence a cardinal rea- 
son for the enactment of so much of law in America 
to compel. Having swept the master form of moral 
instruction from the public schools at the psycho- 
logical moment when it was most needed to amalga- 
mate a one-mass morale and to cohese a truly na- 
tional spirit, and having failed to substitute a 
tangible form of moral instruction in the stead of 
that surrendered, we have reduced perforce in in- 
creasingly baneful measure to the application of 
punitive law; the which can no more round out the 
moral life of a nation, than can laying on of the 
birch establish moral sense in the mind of a too- 
closely in-bred, untaught, sexually-perverse youth. 

Surely, the progeny of those who nobly inhibited 
an inherent dash of narrow-gauge bigotry to fur- 
ther freedom of worship in America should not be 
utterly deprived of spiritual manna in the crucial 
place at the crucial formative period of their lives. 
Should they, they should not at the behest of any 
sect that declines unequivocal kneading of the na- 
tional dough in non-sectarian public schools, in 
favor of the kneading of a school of sect wherein 



Lam Made to Limp 115 

the emphasis is given to spiritual propaganda, duty 
and authority. 

Whether it is so meant or not, the latter policy 
fastens the collar of creed on patriotism; whereas 
the effect of free commingling of children of all 
faiths in and about the public schools serves to file 
off the rough edges of bigotry, and to foster a com- 
mon unit of patriotism, upon which the permanency 
of American institutions must rest. 

More often than not assertion trims truth. The 
burden of proof is rightly upon the accusative form. 
But overdress is not risked in the statement that 
we have yielded pretty nearly all we dare of Consti- 
tutional ground and not slough a balanced democ- 
racy for no man wots what. 

At deadly peril to a national destiny dreamed 
by the constitutional fathers, shall we draw out par- 
ley with disintegrating forces which are ruthlessly 
militant while blindly self-centered. Without regard 
for names, mass or class, we needs must go about 
it directly to reestablish the just might of the law 
in America, or soon enough have a full-sized Roman 
job on our hands. 

Class banditry and a cohesed nationalism, dona- 
tive tossing to terrorism and a sustained national 
virility, are antithetic. A people which suffers that 
combination to take firm root can not endure and 
express a worth-while national purpose, let them 



116 Stop Thief 

stand ostensibly for what they may while preaching 
platitudes. 

Take an illustrative case : A group of disgruntled 
car employees moved on the Supreme Court of the 
United States a short time since with the slogan in 
substance, "We want what we want when we want 
it"; and that in lieu of a favorable decision thereof 
by that august tribunal it would be, — '"Lay on. Mac- 
Duff, and damned be he who first cries, — enough!" 
As often befalls the lines of the Immortal Bard, 
their puissantly vocal spokesman deleted the word 
"hold"; inadvertently, no doubt, because men big 
enough to declare broncho-busting labor war on a 
first class power should know, at least, the order 
of their adversary's going. 

In any case, all will do well to let it sink in that 
their spurned Uncle Sam is right sure to cry the 
"Hold!" And that when the Big Fellow isn't big 
enough to spank incipient anarchists who would 
maul his guidons, he will have reduced to a passing 
experiment, and they to the straight of the greed- 
struck gent who "killed the goose that laid the gold- 
en eggs." If by the merest of possibilities it comes 
to a breaking of the waters, they will be driven to 
higher ground who think themselves sufficiently en- 
trenched to hold in contempt the tidal wave of Con- 
stitutional law. Also, they will have drawn their 
own sting through forcing the issue for government 
ownership and control wherever that may be neces- 



Lam Made to Limp 117 

sary to lend stability to the progress of a people 
who pursue equal justice steadfastly, albeit they 
fly off betimes on countervailing tangents. 

In any case, let us not be prodded into attempt 
at disciplining catch-as-catch-can brigandage be- 
yond borders, while a pedestrian-packed, police- 
patrolled, sun-lit city thoroughfare serves the thief- 
murderer in the U. S. A. And let us assure our 
safety with soldier men, until the subsidence of "un- 
rest which man miscalls delight/' 

Summarizing a cosmic and cardinal ill, it must 
be admitted that had capital kept step with con- 
science, labor had not taken to the lasso and brand- 
ing iron; but even at that in America, where the 
franchise is practically universal, and opportunity 
nearly unrestricted, there is no palliation of the 
open-eyed, cold-blooded law-breaker. For him, law 
that is other than effective because binding is most- 
ly meaningless words. 

Still and all, many hold human nature to be in 
the average what it perhaps may be a thousand 
years hence, and that, in any instance, "Repression 
doesn't repress." If it didn't, the life of a Canadian 
Border Policeman would have been held valueless 
while he was making himself master of many times 
more of lawless domain that had any man anywhere 
before his advent. That he did, because the Cana- 
dian government made his person inviolable, and 
him inevitable. 



118 Stop Thief 

In his 1915 inaugural address Governor-elect 
Charles S. Whitman, of the State of New York, 
crowded the case against lawlessness and the law- 
breaker into this masterful paragraph: 

"The Increase of Crime. 

"A subject deserving the most thoughtful atten- 
tion of the people of the State and of the Legisla- 
ture is the increase of crime and of the spirit of 
lawlessness. Indeed, disregard of the law, impatience 
with legal and moral restraints, contempt for the 
judicial and executive ministers of justice are phe- 
nomena observable in all American communities and 
among all classes. No material prosperity, no 
abounding wealth, no progress in the sciences can 
save us from moral decadence and ultimate decay if 
this spirit of lawlessness and of contempt for legal 
authority shall continue. The growing impatience 
of restraint, moral and legal, to be observed every- 
where in America, the indifference, sordidness, and 
complacency of many of the educated and well-to- 
do, the unchecked and unregulated propaganda of 
those things calculated to prejudice and poison the 
minds of the ignorant and undermine confidence in 
our institutions, the public opinion that tolerates 
lawlessness, whether it be the lynching of a negro, 
or the murder of the obscure, or the violence attend- 
ing nearly all disputes between labor and capital, 
will memtably engender a fatal malady unless the 



Lam Made to Limp 119 

quickened conscience of the American people shall 
call a halt. No class can be above general law. 
There is but one way of meeting the danger, and 
that way is through the creation of a dominant and 
pervading public sentiment in support of the en- 
forcement of the law. Where that sentiment is want- 
ing, no devices of the law can make up for it." 

Americans may take or leave ex-Governor Whit- 
man's forecast; but duty is unshif table which sum- 
mons them to be at extreme pains to crown capital 
sentiments in the minds of their children. When 
parents shall have done that vital much, their up- 
grown lads and lassies will have been given a fair 
chance to figure it out for themselves that somewhat 
of self-effacement in obedience to the law of their 
land is the "strictly-one-price" mark of a pure 
democracy. 



CHAPTER IV 

REFORMATIVE REGIMES 

In America, during the last three decades, the 
crime-impelled have been tossed between opposed 
factions of prison management. Members of the one 
faction have fitted word and deed as if to the deduc- 
tion that there is naught in the criminal to give 
society serious pause. Let a layman into the mind 
of one of these while making the grand rounds of a 
prison with him, and it will not be the fault of the 
guide if the guided refuses the impression that the 
regeneration of the criminal resides mainly in the 
potency of the personal touch, manifest, essentially, 
in the sporting schedule of the place. 

Nor will it signify if the ground gone over is 
reformatory ground whereon trade training from 
outline is enhanced at drawing school; common 
schooling is fitted to the individual case; military 
training with body building exercises in the open is 
a part of the daily regimen ; periods for play afford 
more of outdoor recreation than the average free- 
man can or will take; and indoor entertainment is 
given ungrudgingly. The place must yield of all and 

120 



Refoitmatwe Regimes 12l 

capitalize the going craze for the brutalizing by- 
products of sport, else it is bad medicine. 

Members of the other faction hold the kind and 
amount of crime committed within continental bound- 
aries to be indicative of the course the nation is 
steering. They countercharge their critics with 
triple bidding for crime; first, in having swayed 
public opinion into taking the constantly mounting 
figures thereof lightly for granted ; secondly, in that 
they have deleted to the vanishing point from natu- 
ral correctional measures which steady young men 
whether they are within or without prison confines, 
and which criminal law presupposes in the sentence ; 
and, thirdly, for having switched the emphasis from 
those measures to parasital activities which so often 
ride a lad in free life to the length of determining 
his first criminal act, and which should be given 
greater than auxiliary weight in prison only when 
applied to those whom to build up physically consti- 
tutes the first reform step. 

As between the major schools of reform there 
are other sharply-defined points of departure, none 
of which is more vital than what qualities of mind 
and heart, what preparation in amount and kind, 
should mark the head man entrusted with the singu- 
larly complex task of prescribing for the outfitting 
of crime-driven men who must meet life face to face; 
for it will not serve shall we but supply a given 
prisoner with related working tools; besides, we 



122 Stop Thief 

have to lead him to a liking for the tools and for 
their lawful use. 

Angles of contention converge on the correct an- 
swer to this concrete proposition: Judged from 
either the repressive or the remedial standpoint, 
should a prison, walled or not, be made an indus- 
trial and educational beehive equipped to meet the 
exactions of the majority, who probably would not 
have committed crime had they not been industrially 
outclassed and educationally handicapped : or should 
it pass in the minds of criminals as a place where 
inmate ranks officer ; exaction gives place to caprice ; 
system is shot to pieces ; little of loosely-strewn edu- 
cation and training yields to low-down by-play; 
mock-discipline is yet honeycombed with subterra- 
nean trickery visited upon weaklings by members 
of a junta of felons who engineer for the machina- 
tions of their pals; and where the "atmosphere," 
far from being a voluntarily reformative atmos- 
phere, as upon which your inmate guide will glow- 
ingly insist, is charged with moral filth, plus what 
the criminal calls "bunk," soon enough to take on 
menace, do you but crib from his falsely- allotted 
perquisites. 

Gentlemen who subscribe to prison methods which 
work out agreeably with the latter summary have 
put it freely in print that those who refuse those 
methods reduce to the use of such as the word 
"coddle" as expressive of the ground of their refusal. 



Reformative Regimes 123 

Very far from it indeed; albeit that contention has 
carried in the public mind precisely because exploit- 
ers of the merry-go-round idea of prison reform 
have done at least ninety-nine per cent of public 
writing, and all of public boasting about any kind 
of prison reform. 

Yielding the forum of public opinion, they have 
themselves to blame and have passed up plain duty, 
who have been schooled while paid to sense with sense 
where criminals compound. To be sure, buttering 
of bread befalls heavily betimes ; but so does life's 
grand average upon the habitual offender who is 
part product of prisons wherein he was allowed to 
vegetate and fake. 

As a matter of fact, the worst that could be said 
of obsolete prison methods, falsely played up to the 
public by way of contrast, was at least printable; 
whereas it wouldn't enrich the rising generation to 
read to the roots of certain acts, of certain actors, 
of certain prison "Welfare Leagues." And so, since 
the Welfare League reflects the last word of those 
who assume distinctively far-sighted prison vision, 
as well as to fit the public eye with glasses likewise 
distinctive, vide, at once, the Welfare League: 

There is nothing new nor startling about the fun- 
damental principle, acting from which members of 
Welfare Leagues ostensibly express themselves. 
Prison reform had not to wait upon specifications 
of present-day reformers for supervision over in- 



124 Stop Thief 

mate by inmate. That was being tried out in Amer- 
ica when most of those who now hail it a wonder- 
worker were in knickerbockers. 

Back in the '80's, the writer, then Acting Super- 
intendent of the State Industrial School, situated 
at Rochester, N. Y., was giving inmate coopera- 
tion the fairest field and favor beyond the lettering 
of institutional rules, and the implications in law 
which those rules were written to complement. We 
got good results through going about it in a sane 
way, and we have never let go since for an instant 
of the conviction that a properly-chosen, organized, 
directed and supervised inmate staff is a positive 
asset. Contrariwise, we have not since seen, nor 
heard, nor read a thing on which to base rational 
belief that a close corporation of criminals can be 
made single in its reformative purpose, nor that the 
State can rest secure at any given moment that 
such a corporation shall not be made to serve ulte- 
rior designs. For the present saturnalia of crime, 
those have largely to answer who have disagreed. 

Practical criminologists the country over prose- 
cute methods essentially the same as those which 
Welfare workers allege they prosecute, save only 
as pertains to this, vital, point: Whereas those 
workers wield plenary power greater than granted 
to citizen officers, in the which they are subject only 
to the veto of a man who may or may not probe 
to the bottom either of men or measures ; practical 



Reforimatkte} RSgvrtes 125 

prison heads learned decades ago that, beyond an 
easily-defined limit, even first-offending youths 
should not be over-tempted with the disciplinary 
lever, and should be subject to the oversight of 
every State agent paid to oversee. Further, shall it 
fall out that the agent is unfit to oversee, then 
change the agent but not the agency. And still 
further, that the older the offender and the stronger 
criminal habit upon him, the more binding the duty 
of the State to see with all of its eyes; to see help- 
fully and understandingly with infinite patience, but 
to see, and direct, and govern. 

"Oh, but," will rebut those of child-like faith in 
a scheme which the government of the United States 
would not dream of implanting at West Point, 
where the highest of individual honor is the watch- 
word of the corps, "you are not Mr. So and So, 
nor are they to whom you refer. All of you are 
of the 'Material and Anthropological School 5 and 
don't count. 5 ' As to that, a tag has its uses, — on a 
bale of hay, for instance; gratuitously attached to 
persons it may miss essential values common to men 
close enough to the Creator to be quite sure He 
would not care for a fulsome mouthing of them, nor 
bless attempt to cram them down a criminal's throat. 
However, let us waive the "gratuitous" and search 
for answer to that which must be answered. 

There is no warring with the potency of properly- 
expressed personal magnetism to further reform 



126 Stop Thief 

ends, but just why, while tossing prudence to the 
winds, must the magnetism run to so much of mon- 
key-business with scratching of backs, and to so 
little of building of solid foundations from which 
to carry up in free life? 

Are the grand average of employers to be im- 
pressed with an ex-prisoner's recital of his opinions 
and regards, or by the accurate skill of his hands 
and brain? 

What is there reformative that a convicted felon 
can contrive, which a finished warden and criminolo- 
gist ought not the better plan and execute? 

If you bore to bedrock, what right has a penal 
agent to apply vital paragraphs of penal law sharp- 
ly at variance with the least elastic of their manda- 
tory predicates? Were those predicates advisedly 
placed out of the sum of human experience in order 
to conserve law and order, or were they chosen that 
they might further the mock-prison schemes of 
would-be bellwethers of reform? Where, on Euro- 
pean soil, at this moment, such predicates do not 
predicate, what class of humans are in command? 

At what conclusions must convicted felons arrive 
if a warden may bait his superiors in authority, 
while he juggles cardinal provisions of criminal 
law? What more must he do before he becomes a 
menace to the public safety, no matter what his per- 
sonal attributes? 

Is the call for all-purpose penologists who are 



Refor*matwe Regimes 127 

fitted to merge the good will of officers and inmates 
with their own in furtherance of fundamental re- 
form measures: or is it for him who breaks in un- 
equipped, yet obsessed by the most childish of re- 
form fallacies to the effect that educational and in- 
dustrial exactions upon prisoners in free life are 
but incidental, as compared with the benign influ- 
ence that flows from his extended palm? 

Were it simply advisable and not humane as well, 
imprisoned unfortunates should be led kindly to 
the light and encouraged; forgiven much of natural 
fault; allowed to exercise freely in the open during 
all-sufficient periods; given frequent opportunity by 
their chiefs to thresh out personal and institutional 
ills, real or imaginary; and be able to bank on the 
best of not one, but of every member of the citizen 
staff. Much more than all of that in detail a master 
prison man should get done, stript of fuss, feathers 
and fireworks. Will he, comprehensively, while 
afflicted with a too great nearness to himself result- 
ing in the personal-popularity itch, which leads him 
into the fatal snare of playing criminals up to play, 
against the law and agents of the law, and down to 
applied knowledge and skill? 

Happen such an one guides a trenchant pen which 
guides press agents ; happen, also, he places a good- 
ly number of well-behaved, discharged prisoners at 
work in a manufacturing plant run by a singular 
man whose singular business prospers singularly 



128 Stop Thief 

during a singular industrial period about to close. 
What has all of that to do vitally with the broad 
question of reformation, save that it points the 
pregnant possibilities of intensive and wholly inclu- 
sive industrial training for prisoners? What to do 
has it with the plight of unskilled, ill-behaved predal 
felons left behind, who have not been reached spite 
of all of the play-acting, who can not be "placed" 
honestly therefore, and in whom resides the nucleus 
of the reform problem the United States of America 
over? 

Considering that at least ninety-nine per cent of 
city-bred ex-prisoners will have to be placed indus- 
trially or commercially, if they are to stay placed 
when America shall have reaped her bunker finan- 
cial harvest sown by the late World War, how much 
have extraordinary conditions arising out of the 
sowing to do with the preparedness of ex-prisoners 
to stand the strain when there are about two pris- 
oners for every job, instead of about that number 
of jobs for every prisoner, skilled or unskilled, as 
now? 

It is right easy to steer close to and for the pick 
of intrinsically good prisoners. It is not supremely 
difficult to get inside of others who are not intrinsi- 
cally bad, albeit their free-life acts leave but a thin 
margin between the good and the bad. It is a 
totally different stroke to strike into the instinctive, 
habitual, predatory felon, who likes being just that 



Reforinatv&e! 'Regvrttes 129 

better than anything else on earth, unless it is be- 
ing clever enough to overreach him who holds forth 
cocksure with a panacea for the crime habit. The 
crime habit, mark you, fitted partly by nature and 
partly by long years of practice to the mind and 
matter of the man. 

Such an one, prison rounder and "pal" of prison 
rounders, resents first of all being considered plas- 
tic clay in any man's hands. He has weighed values 
for himself, made his selections, knows what he wants 
and why he wants it the way he goes after it. He 
will put on or take off tentatively to please if you 
suit him, or for a consideration if you don't; but 
he doesn't elect to encumber himself lightly with any 
part of the social load. You may win him to it, 
but you won't until you know him and he knows 
you from tip to toe, and that won't be in a fort- 
night on your side; and you won't ever with the 
sum of fads, fancies and sporting features. You 
can, possibly, if your gifts are great to represent 
a sound prison regime ; if you know how to approach 
and attack, and especially if you know how to re- 
treat tactfully and as tactfully approach again. 

Shall a man tell of simple and easy execution 
more serviceable, tell him to "tell it to the marines." 
Tell him, also, that fulsome praise of him by the 
true criminal usually means that he is being 
"worked" to criminal ends of which cunning crooks 
never, for a moment, lose sight. Tell him further 



130 Stop Thief 

that when the average prisoner of the class waxes 
enthusiastic over the merits of the prison that con- 
fines him, it's a billion dollars to a bobolink there 
is something radically wrong, either with the prison 
regime, or with the man who directs the prosecution 
of it. And tell him stoutly that where reformation 
abides there abides the spirit of Christ the carpen- 
ter. According to the silences that bespeak concen- 
trated endeavor is the genuine to be judged. 

While there should be established a manly bond 
as between prisoners and institutional officers, that 
bond ceases to bind for reformation exactly in pro- 
portion as it motives prisoners to express undue 
familiarity of kind whatsoever. At any rate, where 
patronage is rife in prison, put on far-sighted glasses 
and see if you can not search out the hiding motive 
for the unequal distribution of it. 

Planning future criminal conquests, the deeply-* 
dyed criminal would be a dunce indeed, did not he 
pull and play for "easy-pickin' " in lettering made 
to his hand; lettering for prison sentences and re- 
gimes which recalls Horace Walpole's "I hold a per- 
fect comedy to be the perfection of human composi- 
tion." Far from rating the average criminal lightly 
because he doesn't measure to a yardstick of mental- 
ity which he spurns, we have to deal with him while 
he is in the frame of mind which prodded Robert 
Browning to pen these razor-edge lines: 



Refofmatwe RSgvmes 131 

"Which of you I did enable 

Once to slip inside of my breast, 
There to catalogue and label 

What I like least, and what love best?" 

A very large percentage of criminals are rated 
"morons" by surface-sign penologists who usually 
plan prison activities as if it were exactly the thing 
to fix that rating. As a matter of fact, the word 
"moron," as applied other than to the crassest and 
least equipped of criminals, is aimed wide of the 
mark. Those surest of word-tags shunt the fact 
that criminality to the real criminal is a calling, 
considering which he does not differ mentally from 
millions of sub-strata freemen, held down by handi- 
cap piled on handicap. He is usually sub-normal 
mentally only in the sense that he has been deprived 
and chooses to pick a living. Aside from the fact 
that he is an all-around deflective and not a mental 
defective, on the average, what wants to sink in is 
that the predal felon's every faculty is concentrated 
on the end he seeks, which is to be a clever thief, 
exactly in the sense that another aims to be a 
clever lawyer of the shyster class. 

The man harnessed to acts of predation doesn't 
care a rupee whether the earth revolves about the 
sun, or the sun about the earth. He might well foozle 
at a mental test for a ten-year-old, as for the mat- 
ter of that so might the examiner if called upon in- 



132 Stop Thief 

stantaneously to solve problems alien to his chosen 
line of thought. The end he had sought and seeks 
explains why the average criminal gives his mind to 
little outside of his own specialty; but he can do a 
slick piece of "picking" and not leave a finger print, 
"plant" or cash in the bulk of his loot, lead Johnny 
Detective a merry cross-country chase, and then, if 
caught and corralled, he can "work" about ninety- 
nine per cent of "surface-sign penologists" ad ftnem. 

Dearer to the heart of the criminal by choice 
than any Iron Cross is the applause of expert crafts- 
men of his grade; when he can win it, he is further 
clever enough to confirm rather than refute conclu- 
sions of the cocksure psychologist to the effect that 
he is mostly victim of arrest of mental development. 
Self-paced, he will pick with a pick in the open to 
his own physical ends ; yes, but don't crowd, and 
do expect him to "keep under cover" his criminal 
record and the major part of schooling he may have 
had in free or former prison life, while he holds in 
reserve sufficient of mental-physical skill to solve 
any combination the locksmith can contrive. 

Scores of active workers who strive manfully and 
studiously all of the way to meet the varying needs 
of the varied felon have too long yielded the public 
forum to two classes of prison reformers who are 
equally obstructive of prison reform: (1) "Hello, 
Bill!" triflers who are long on pull, the press, and 
the "personal equation." Exploiting the alloy in 



RefotmatvDe Regvrrws 133 

the last named in lieu of a hard-won equipment 
strangest to their striving, they will give off or take 
on any reform antic calculated to arrest the atten- 
tion of (2) Self -nominated criminologists of lay 
extraction who base militant, even incendiary, re- 
form agitation on an idea of at least ninety per 
cent spurious, but which with them amounts to an 
obsession. Taken in the broad, the fetich is that 
the State should toady to, and thus "get along" 
with, its criminals. Quite to the contrary, actual 
reformation issues in the case of the actual criminal 
only when he shall have been made over sufficiently 
to enable him to "get along" with the State. Iso- 
lated and much-touted cases which seem to war with 
the latter truth seldom if ever relate to the "actual 
criminal" formed or reformed. There is vast differ- 
ence between the Jean Valjean brand of offender 
and the beast who breaks for a killing with a sneer 
in his heart for human life. 

Through much of noise, others have sought and 
seek to shape opinion at large in favor of mock 
schemes which are opposed to every known law gov- 
erning human progress ; fantasies that offend intelli- 
gence; curriculums which are planned as if for kin- 
dergarten play; much of bone rattling in a Bowery 
atmosphere; more of fake "features" that break up 
continuity both of individual and mass endeavor and 
therefore of the institutional regime; and most of 
disruptive sport upon which Moses of reform would 



134 Stop Thief 

fasten the won't-work fists of bruisers of the prize 
ring. 

The last vacuity and present pressing urge is to 
turn the discipline, the very spine of the institu- 
tional frame, over to a coterie of convicted felons 
for prescription, proscription and regulation. That 
were a precarious throw in a college where the units 
are mostly like and normal, are held to averages, 
and where the mass strive practically as a unit to 
a common end. In a convict prison where dissimi- 
lar, when not abnormal, units head for different and 
differing ends, spite of their lip-service and bunco- 
steering in the interest of "easy-picking"; where 
the clique is inevitable, and gravitation to like 
cliques of like units is as inevitable ; where the clever- 
est criminologist cannot fathom all of the ulterior 
motives which move the cunningest and best-behaved 
of prisoners to feather their nests, regardless of 
the pitiful plight of their less brainy, yet more 
manly, fellows — it is close to criminal practice of 
the kind for which the law holds irresponsibles, and 
which the taxpayer will excoriate, once it bores in 
that he and the bulk of criminals are mulcted 
through its operation. 

Banalities of reform impose upon but a very few 
of field workers; and only upon the most stupid 
in the sense that self-interest constrains them to 
hush convictions, rather meanly, perhaps, which the 
decent prisoner himself will admit are well-grounded, 



Reformative Rkgmws 135 

if you knew how to get at him, and he knows you 
will not name him thereof. 

As if to make the case fully binding, gentlemen 
employ pressure for commitment of first-offense 
felons to convict prisons conducted as given; that, 
not only, but to penitentiaries wherein the estab- 
lishment of a synthetic regime of reform is impos- 
sible, and wherein the lowest of habitual criminal 
rounders and sexual perverts are always in evi- 
dence; and that, rather than to bona-fide reforma- 
tories, which are rated the world over by those 
really in the know as among the highest in reform 
efficiency. The last procedure constitutes, in itself, 
a true bill against overnight plungers who seem in- 
capable of devising a single man-refining process 
which is function free of reactive alloy. 

With an airy wave of the hand, the same gentle- 
men dismiss reformatories as "forty years behind 
the times." By that flippantly-gestured assertion 
they mean forty years behind institutions run prac- 
tically in accordance with the plans and specifica- 
tions of prisoners, and appreciably, therefore, on 
the vaudeville plan, with the human cuckoo and 
change artist featured. Nevertheless, it is certain 
as death that prisons as well as reformatories so 
run will reduce in due time to spineless, subterra- 
nean frauds, constantly in ferment over the question 
as to which class of felons shall "put over" the 
most of anti-social activities in clearing houses for 



136 Stop Thief 

criminals. The cardinal reason for the mushy enthu- 
siasm of prisoners for men and measures in question 
provokes repeated repetition, because that clumsy, 
while cheap, subterfuge is so slow in taking up its 
abode in the public consciousness. 

It is that the daily schedule of such an institu- 
tion is precisely fitted for ulterior machinations, the 
which a fulsome mouthing and advertising do not 
change in the least. It is that therein prisoners can 
malinger, dictate essentially, be amused along lines 
of distinctively parasital whim, have a "bum argu- 
ment every minute," and belittle those who believe 
that a white-bosomed boiled shirt on a prisoner is 
meaningless unless it symbolizes his stiffened deter- 
mination to win out after the dictates of a white 
heart. It is that therein emulation of the truly good 
and serviceable waits on the last banality. Therein, 
deterrence, short of which about twenty-five out of 
every hundred members of a free society would 
head for the rocks, is nil. Therein and thereof, 
shadow-dancers shunt substance. And therein the 
real criminal can and does fool most everybody, in- 
cluding himself, most of the time; for, above all 
others, he pays as he goes in prison, out of wasted 
opportunity and a spirit at war with that to which 
he must adjust or be brushed aside in the end. 

In and out of prison, the real issue as pertains 
to the real criminal is essentially that which moved 
the Christ to visit His most scathing words of con- 



Reformative RSgvmes 137 

detonation upon drones of the human hive. Next 
in the order of His wrath came conscienceless money- 
getters. Never, by so much as a syllable, did He 
compromise with either. Neither did He shrive 
other than the repentant thief until he had put off 
sin and taken on "faith with works." And He "cod- 
dled" no man; not even the chosen of His disciples. 
That is meaty ruminative matter for some who ap- 
ply their pet foibles of reform in reverse of the 
meaning of the Saviour's deeds and words; it is, 
because your real criminal is the real problem, and 
he is nearly always a predal parasite by selection 
who aims to employ the last subterfuge in further- 
ance of that selection. 

With a cunning which overreaches such as 
Binet-Simon tests, also the best of intentions of the 
unequipped who have had no call to cross those 
schooled to probe to that cunning, the criminal 
clubs with combination. Therefore his narrative 
has stressed the lie, lurking or direct, calculated to 
discredit men and measures, the one of which he 
could not readily deceive, and the other defeat. And 
so, all of noise having been made by birds of a 
feather and those who preen their plumage, the 
public has been led to believe that little has been 
left unsaid by the other side. 

The public could not know that censorship of 
criminological matter practically has been main- 
tained by lay reformers; nor that the writings of 



138 Stop Thief 

those who have dared the closed preserve have been 
"reviewed" by swivel-chair penologists with axes to 
grind, and disposed of with criticism which ignored 
the main arteries of the context, and otherwise was 
at patronizing pains to "damn with faint praise." 

Publishers are excusable in having had an eye to 
financial returns ; yet it should have occurred to 
them that there was a leak somewhere in prison 
schemes that encouraged social bandits to "come 
a-shootin* " in constantly increasing numbers at 
high noon; and to go jeeringly to prison, if caught 
and convicted, against which the odds are now about 
fifty to one. At any rate, the public has arrived at 
a state of mind which wants to know, and means 
that truth shall have a hearing. 

A part of the specific truth is that the agricul- 
tural prison, the much-touted panacea for crime, is 
an illusion and a snare, conducted as it is, usually, 
on American soil, for other than juvenile offenders. 

Conducted on Australian soil, under Australian 
conditions and edicts of the Commissioner General 
of Prisons for the Crown, backed by penal law which 
assures actually intensive farming with all-around 
conduct and endeavor to match, it clasps hands, 
for Australians, with industrial training, of which 
it is, in essence, a branch. Given over in America 
mainly, as it is, in effect, to summer vacations where- 
of prisoners set the pace of it and therefore the price 
for it, it misses at once the marks alike of economy, 



Reforinative RSgimes 139 

prevention, deterrence and reformation. It is in 
fact a bid for exactly that which it assumes either 
to ameliorate or cure. And so, specifically as to 
the prison farm, with or without a Welfare League: 

The country-bred felon is negligible as relates to 
the total of crime and to the character of it. The 
city-bred felon is negligible who would work a farm 
consecutively for true with offer of a quit-claim 
deed to it. That being the concise case stripped of 
buncombe, why the shouting, and jostling, and 
press-agenting for the farm-prison? 

Does the reformative effect of aesthetic prison 
farming so stand out in the parole record as to make 
that effect paramount, even arresting? 

If the Earth Mother actually got but so far into 
the system of the farm-prisoner as to make the 
smell of her soil lastingly grateful to his nostrils, 
wouldn't she win a very great many of the poverty- 
bred-in-squalor of him permanently to her bosom? 
If she doesn't win any to speak of, even tentatively, 
and she doesn't, isn't that fact fairly indicative of 
mere mouthing her virtues and faking her benefits 
by prisoners in order to court favor and clinch easy- 
going to an early parole and a more fortuitous 
swing around the criminal circle? 

Were prisoner farmers timed and paced as farm 
farmers time and pace indigenous help, would city- 
bred felons "beat it" to or from farm-prisons? Had 
prisoner farmers been reasonably timed and paced 



140 Stop Thief 

who worked the prison portion alone of the 42,738 
acres of New York State farm property for the 
year 1916, would farm produce for State institu- 
tions have cost the State $2,138,504 for that year? 
If they were not reasonably so timed and paced, 
why not in the name of that kind of reformation? 

If simply to "hold the mirror up to nature" is 
the vital thing to be done for city-bred felons, why, 
as to the first-offending of them, any prison? Why 
not indent them to farmers on their own recogni- 
zance to make good in restitution and service under 
reasonable writing? Why not, and subject them to 
loss of time in service, and commitment to such penal 
institutions as original committing magistrates would 
deem wise, shall they have failed to measure reason- 
ably to those terms? 

That would lighten the taxpayer's load, relieve 
the tension upon farmers to obtain hired help, effect 
natural reward and punishment, subject fellows who 
slip rather than slide illegally to contact with aspir- 
ing criminals, only of their choosing expressed at 
least twice in the act; and afford thousands of 
chance-battered lads a fair fighting show to pull 
up actually on honor free of the felon's brand. 

The "on honor" part of the proposition would 
be made flat and unprofitable through the overfeed- 
ing of it. When indentured and without stuffing him 
with the idea, a lad should be impressed with the 
fact that he is placed on honor. Also, he to whom 



Reformative RSgvnties 141 

the lad is to be indentured should be impressed with 
the fact that the lad had been so impressed, should 
not be reminded of it thereafter, and should be 
allowed to work the thing out quietly for himself. 
In the meantime, self-interest in the comparison as 
between farm and prison conditions might hold safe 
the great bulk of lads not yet capable of sustaining 
a superlative sense of honor. y 

The on honor mark is palpably missed at farm- 
prisons wherein is kept constantly at leash a pack 
of braying bloodhounds, suggestive both of breach 
of honor and the fangs of the law; and that mark 
is made cheaply misleading beyond prison-farm con- 
fines when the unqualified word is prefixed, and the 
phrase is exploited to read "strictly on honor." 
The point is that we have expressed once more the 
mode of low level at war with the vaunting word, 
which is to say: a pack of repressive bloodhounds 
in the flesh, as opposed to "strictly on honor" out 
of mouth. Moreover, we have the personal equation 
at odds with the purpose of the pack. And do farm- 
prison guards trail the pack empty-handed when the 
latter is placed on the scent of escaping prisoners 
of the first-offending class? If they do not, why 
pound either the surrounding walls or the armed 
guards on them, of convict prisons of last resort, 
wherein there is always a free sprinkling of "life" 
homicides, and wherein many-offense criminals by 
all degrees of assault are the common lot? 



142 Stop Thief 

Nevertheless, an agricultural prison, run to in- 
tensive farming, would be far more serviceable than 
an industrial prison wherein inculcation of indus- 
trial habit is arrested through yielding to prisoners 
for variety of employment gone about half-hearted- 
ly, and further mulcted of its meaning by ill-timed 
play and amusement, the mere suspicion of much of 
the latter of which is as a slap on the cheek of 
reformation. 

In any case, why dress comparison in the flimsi- 
est of aesthetic lingerie? If tumbling out of the bed 
at 5 :00 A. M. to spread manure all day, then take 
one's lick at after-supper chores will be reformative 
if reformative because it is designedly practical 
rather than dreamily poetical, why not put it that 
way for what it is worth? When it is not put that 
way and is dished up a la singing bird and soul's 
ease, wouldn't it be well to salt freely before swal- 
lowing? 

Open-handed Nature needs no champion, though 
she reserves her queenly bounties for him who brings 
to her the mood receptive. That fact alone knocks 
the pinning from under the reformative claims ad- 
vanced for the prison-farm. Let the lure of the 
urban whirl once get into the blood of the crime- 
free, city-bred man, and it is nearly certain to de- 
cide his geographic destiny. Should his more imme- 
diate ancestry carry to nature-loving farmers, he 
will likely have moods during which the call of open 



Refo¥matfa)d Regimes 143 

spaces will be strong upon him. Yet the moods will 
be as moments compared with the length of his days, 
and as incidental things apart put against the sum 
of his predilections. Could he fill the shoes of the 
old-time cavalier farmer flanked by his peers given 
to the gun, the flask, the gaming table, the merry 
maiden and the minuet, that might do. But to turn 
out with the chickens and tread it between house, 
barn, shed, pen, crib and coop throughout the long 
winter months, not he; not until as bad as twitching 
nerves cry out for surcease from the city's urge 
and surge. 

Say not a word of the confirmed night prowler 
and habitue of underworld haunts who would lie 
awake o'nights rather than dream of hard work, fit 
the application to even the city-bred circumstantial 
criminal, and it tells why he and farming cross- 
match. Notwithstanding, many good people indulge 
day dreams of the ex-criminal farmer. While in the 
dream state, many of the same people have no doubt 
scooped up "much fine gold" out of the gutter. 
When actual coin issues with such dreams, the con- 
firmed city-bred felon will take on more of farm- 
ing than the punitive measure compels ; and he won't 
then unless advantages accrue which make appeal 
distinctively apart from farming. And don't let it 
get away for a moment that confirmed city-bred 
felons constitute the crux of the crime question. 

Indenture might be made to work out for first- 



144 Stop Thief 

offenders, if founded upon the right kind of proba- 
tory guidance, backed by methods of procedure 
which would make the capture of elopers practical- 
ly inevitable. Even so, it would require most care- 
ful handling maintained free of makeshifts. To in- 
cline a lad to lean, rather than to try hard and keep 
on trying, would be fatal, above all. We have it 
"practically inevitable," because half-way measures 
employed to apprehend elopers amount to a direct 
bid for them to elope. 

The Canadian determination to come up with the 
eloper rings true in that the illegal act is dealt with 
primarily from the standpoint of its effect upon the 
mass. Also, — since alienists themselves differ as to 
the legal degree of guilt of offenders in the execu- 
tion of illegal acts, — the common safety is held to 
demand that the commonwealth shall be given the 
benefit of all doubts, particularly as to the legal 
disposition of offenders of the blood-spilling kidney. 

Were not the straining for the opposite proce- 
dure in and out of court rooms in America, the likes 
of Harry K. Thaw would stand convicted of the 
uncovered act, and be sentenced for what they are, 
instead of in response to a mercurial public senti- 
ment, influenced more likely than not by the maud- 
lin and baldly anti-social. 

Thaw, for instance, started his criminal career 
on his belly in the nursery, beating a tattoo on the 
floor with the toes of his shoes, screaming for what 



Reformative RSgvmes 145 

he wanted, and getting it. His congenital neurotic 
taint was known admittedly, all of the way, by those 
of his own household. 

Whether Thaw's perverted sexual instinct was 
acquired in the usual ways during childhood, or it 
crept in with his unfolding sexual power, or it was 
one of the cross-flings of Nature, will never be 
known, unless Thaw himself shall have supplied the 
connecting links. However established, the neurosis 
and the perversion would be mutually reactive while 
destructive of the man in Thaw, which fact should 
constitute the least of reasons for his immunity from 
legal prescriptions. 

In any case, when Thaw murdered Stanford 
White he was surely a finished egoist and morbid 
neurotic who had piled profligacy upon profligacy, 
while brazenly contemptuous of consequences, be- 
cause confident his string on the Thaw millions would 
pull him through. More to the crucial point, he 
should not have known a day of liberty after the 
one on which he flippantly executed that murder, 
when he was, in all human probability, a masochist 
by flagellation. 

At Thaw's trial for the killing of White, Thaw's 
neurosis was featured by the defense; his profligacy 
and egoism were commonly out of mouth and easily 
fitted to him; his whole course had been run in such 
a manner as to nail to him the assumption of im- 
munity from punishment for a price; his masochis- 



146 Stop Thief 

tic propensity lurked invitingly here and there in 
the evidence; yet the prosecution obligingly trained 
its great-gun fire on the mock-heroic mark set up 
by his counsel. Moreover, alleged justification of a 
killing resided in the alleged betrayal of a woman 
at an alleged time when Thaw had not an iota of 
legal claim upon her. And the cardinal allegations 
were by the variously and most vitally motivated 
witness for Thaw, who had to be garbed in white, 
and WHITE in deepest black, if her tale was to 
grease the going for acquittal. 

Whatever the quality of the woman's testimony, 
we have it out of her own mouth that she was in 
mortal fear of her life, once Thaw was at large. 
Just why that after she had pyramided odium upon 
the memory of White while lashing herself in the 
words she did in order to save Thaw? If because 
of Thaw's threats, as she claimed, just why and what 
the threats? If Thaw was good enough to save as 
she saved him, just why, saved, wasn't he good 
enough to live with, and his reach to a bulging ex- 
chequer? 

Isn't it highly probable that the key to the 
woman's testimony, as well as to the killing of Stan- 
ford White, is shadowed forth in Thaw's last maso- 
chistic act, for which he was last in the law's toils? 
If there is nothing to that reasonable deduction, and 
everything in the case as closed by the defense, what 
is there in it other than to sober society as to the 



Refofmatvae Regimes ' 147 

capital motive for each capital act, of each capital 
actor, in a tragedy cunningly staged by a neurotic, 
erotic, egoistic, from-the-nursery-built brute? 

What is it in so many Americans which renders 
their moral scent valueless and them mawkish, once 
they are full tilt on the trail of a criminally sala- 
cious "thrill"? What was it in their makeup which 
refused the palpable Thaw all the way from the 
cradle to the legal fiasco in New Hampshire, while 
insisting upon him at his own valuation, cunningly 
flashed on "movie" screens the country over? What 
of law which divided States ostensibly united for the 
common good, on the question as to the proper dis- 
posal of such a fugitive from justice, apprehended 
within any State in the Union? 

Assuming Thaw to have been a monomaniac, hav- 
ing drawn human blood, was he the more, or less, a 
menace to the public safety than he was before he 
drew blood? What else, in common sense, had his 
mentality to do with the disposition of him by a 
State wherein he sought immunity from apprehen- 
sion by a sister State? 

The foregoing brief summary is thought worth 
while and in place to emphasize the fact that com- 
prehensive analysis of the criminal, of his crime, and 
of his reformation, must take serious cognizance of 
the measure in which a spurious public sentiment 
governs. If, as pertains to the impulse by which he 
was obsessed, Thaw was not beyond human help 



148 Stop Thief 

before he slipped the handcuffs of the law, his maso- 
chistic act following upon his release from the law's 
toils seems to tell that he was done for when a 
"spurious public sentiment" got through with him. 

From the standpoint of equal justice, the respon- 
sibility of society for a given criminal may be argued 
either up or down. The crux of that question fre- 
quently resides in what manner and degree man is 
the keeper of his fellow who insists upon being kept ; 
and that issue may stand athwart of the more 
aesthetic of two perfectly good motives for human 
action. However, in so far as public opinion oper- 
ates to speed the criminal from court after having 
confirmed him there, it is free of criminal partici- 
pation only in the sense that the damage done is 
done unwittingly. A community that doesn't know 
why its criminals are criminal and remain criminal, 
lacks fundamental knowledge from which to specify 
either for or against them. 

There is no other explanation for crime on the 
increase in America and on the decrease in England 
during the last two decades; decades during which 
the crime problem of peoples cousin-german was 
nearly the same, and when furbelows in the limelight 
were let loose in American prisons, while Britain 
went on her quiet, cohesed, and humane yet sanely- 
repressive way without suspicion of frill or flounce. 
Still, England's criminological cult dilettante are 
certain prison progress would have been markedly 



Refoi*matwe Regimes 149 

enhanced had they been at the prison helm. Hardly ! 
The like American cult charted the reform course 
during those decades and the comparison is as it is, 
while the police authorities call citizens to arms to 
stop murderous marauders. 

Neither is there full explanation otherwise for the 
meagre efficiency of the American ex-reformatory 
lad as compared with the commanding worth of the 
English ex-reformatory lad, nor why England makes 
the most and America the least of ex-prisoners of 
all grades; nor for the American recidivist who 
holds all of the world's records ; nor for the Apache 
of the Paris boulevard outdone by the murderous 
footpad of the American metropolis, who waits 
neither upon night nor ten thousand of the be- 
badged; nor for the sum singular of capital crime 
in America, where the average prison term is short- 
est, where prison life is made most endurable, and 
where probation before and after conviction for fel- 
ony is the longest drawn out and the most liberal. 

Tracing effect to cause, one can be tripped easily 
into a straining to see that which one is predisposed 
to see; and all are more or less predisposed to see, 
else monogamous mating of male and female of the 
human species would not have won out over polyg- 
amy. But since man's judgment issues largely out 
of the sum of objective impressions, his subjective 
predilections must have a balance wheel, else his 
mind will groove to one or another form of fetich- 



150 Stop Thief 

ism; and fetichism is single-seeing which grossly 
exaggerates the importance of a single part of, or 
object attaching to, the body of anything. 

Hence the sexual fetichist who fondles milady's 
shoe which, if it be of black leather, high-heeled and 
buttons, leaves him spurning the soul and body of 
her. Hence, too, the fetichist who coddles high- 
heeled sentiment, which, in his mind, can be made 
to supplant the heart of reformation, which is pre- 
paredness; also the antithesis of the sentimentalist 
and stickler for steel-ribbed retribution. Then there 
are the bald opportunists, whose fetich it is to affect 
the colors of Public Opinion, name it otherwise what 
you will; and their small army of retainers, the 
jockeys of reform, who elect to ride the winning 
mount, and name that what you will so it lands 
them "inside of the money." 

All of which is very far from inclusive, but it 
tells of a house of reform divided against itself, to 
the exclusion of team-work, which alone is reason 
sufficient for comparative instead of commensurate 
results obtained in America's reformatories and 
prisons. Furthermore, had separatists been sound 
in their singular conclusions, singular application 
of them would have left the criminal up-stump, and 
their structures of reform wabbling; for pre-crim- 
inal motivations and post-criminal exactions of the 
true criminal are never singular, and the reform 
structure must needs be bound solidly part and part 



Reforirriiatvae RSgimes 151 

if it is to stand and express a worth-while purpose. 

Looking at a massive, steel-framed, modern "sky- 
scraper," not one in a thousand will give thought 
to the hundreds of thousands of little steel bolts that 
hold it staunch and true up there thirty stories. 
Looking at a sky-pointing sentiment, not one lay 
reformer could, if he would, think of the scores of 
comparatively little ties which must bind it in prison 
if it is to be effectively applied to all classes of pris- 
oners; he wouldn't for exactly the same reason he 
couldn't execute an operation for appendicitis ; he 
couldn't, because emotion or knife, it must mate 
with a carefully-screened experience, or he will foozle 
with it; and the more singular the application of 
his fetich of reform, the more pronounced will be 
his foozle. 

As a matter of fact, more or less of sentiment 
lurks in every worth-while thing a man does or at- 
tempts to do. Sentimentalists but repeat primal 
truth when they assert that sentiment is always an 
element of reform, and that it may strike to the 
depth of a base element in a given case of reforma- 
tion. Notwithstanding, that man only has call to 
lend emphasis to sentiment in reform work who fully 
understands the dangerous nature of the by-prod- 
ucts of sentiment. 

The by-products of sentiment will complement 
those of the base element if they are refined as well 
as confined to a serviceable end; whereas if they 



152 Stop Thief 

are dumped promiscuously to a short-sighted, con- 
venient end into the touch-and-go minds of criminals, 
they will flame and do untold damage there. 

Take a material case to illustrate: Having a 
great, big thing in crude oil, the Standard Oil Com- 
pany started dumping the by-products thereof 
where it could best be rid of them. At Rochester, 
N. Y., they found their way into the city sewers. 
That resulted in a naphtha explosion which wrecked 
part of the city sewerage system and occasioned 
loss by fire of several flouring mills in the mill sec- 
tion. Such reactions threatened the profits accru- 
ing from the marketing of the base product. The 
company cast about for relief, with the result that 
those same by-products bless both buyer and seller 
to-day. 

As relates to the sewer of the mind and by-prod- 
ucts of sentiment dumped into it, — from the "movie" 
screen, for instance — the parallel is obvious. Never- 
theless, the public ear and eye have been supersensi- 
tive to the sentimental monotone, while dull to the 
infinite graduation of its shadings. 

Betimes, 'tis pity the earnest one-string player 
doesn't take to the study of criminological harmony. 
More often the virtuoso is a slick charlatan out for 
spoils; most often he plans imagery that pays; but 
whichever his classification, given to him a gift of 
gab with which to work off frayed platitudes, and 
he can leave an American audience wondering how 



Refor*matwe Regimes 153 

criminology got along so long without him. With 
the audience, the conclusion is foster-child of the 
desire to wash its hands of the criminal in the least 
troublesome, least expensive, and most expeditious 
way; and that can't be, because about the ninety- 
and-nine of crass criminals are to be reformed, if 
reformed, through procedure exactly the reverse. 
And mark it once again that the crass criminal is 
the crime problem. 

Through accepting the bald untruth that refor- 
mation of the "submerged tenth" of felons reduces 
to applied sentiment, the public has earned the va- 
ried and various imposts springing therefrom. Self- 
made men ought to have had it on its face that, if 
formation of character issues out of hard work, hard 
going, and hard knocks, reformation of character 
cannot ensue upon the mere tossing of sentimental 
bon-bons, — serviceable as they are when sped from 
heart strings drawn to the dictates of a comprehen- 
sive understanding. 

Reformation differs from another human prob- 
lem in that laws governing it are binding alike as 
to the putting off of the bad and taking on of the 
good. So much Nature exacts while she works with- 
out rest to rehabilitate man into his original heri- 
tage of balanced well-being. With man's lapses 
Nature has naught to do, save that she shapes all 
of flesh to its cell substance; and she does even 
that benignly, for did she mold man to perfect flesh 



154 Stop Thief 

in the face of his physical transgressions, he had 
picked and passed ere he had dug to the roots of 
destructive metabolism. Nor would broken law of 
being at a bargain price have served. The inevitable- 
ness of Nature's last impost had to get on man's 
nerves and stay there, before he would take up seri- 
ous consideration of spiritual values. "Be good," 
says she, "if you want to be handsome," meaning, 
of course, in the broad. 

Because the law of compensation heaps to infinite 
measure it is that your confirmed thief shapes to 
anti-social sequence piled on anti-social sequence. 
Shall most of the piling have been effected by his 
forbears, he will thieve the more readily because of 
that fact, albeit a meaner job may be done by him 
concerning whose ancestry no overt illegal act is 
discoverable back as far as hereditary transmission 
is supposed to strike. Still, could one search his 
blood with an all-seeing eye, he will have been found 
within the law; say for an instinctive cheat here, a 
loose moralist there, and a fast alcoholic elsewhere, 
cropping out from either blood line and resulting in 
a "pore critter," besmirched with more or less of 
all of the tar. 

Many come so by a marked neurosis which devel- 
ops ever-increasing irritableness with concomitant 
weakening of the will-power and lowering of resis- 
tance to evil influences, inclusive of the impulse to 
thieve. They usually know they are stricken, shrink 



Reformatwe Regimes 155 

from the ever-heavier burden visited upon them by 
their natural handicaps, sour on life in general and 
work in particular, and choose the line of supposedly 
lesser resistance to a packed purse. 

Place such an one habitually in a criminous en- 
vironment, and anything may happen to him. Snatch 
him time and again out of that environment, as often 
to parole him from prison over the mushroom route, 
and your responsibility for him is as the number 
of times you so sin against him. For him there is 
no short cut to reformation, taking which he will 
endure under pressure. Save only for the fact that 
Nature remains his fast friend, he must retrace step 
for step, substitute habit for habit ; yea, even learn 
to counter on carnal sin with the last resource the 
human mind can employ, which is to shunt a bad 
thought for a good one. 

Notwithstanding, some who assume to set the re- 
form pace have the one eye fixed on the conduct 
record, and the other eye on the exit door. Noth- 
ing could be more fallacious, even when figures are 
free of assumed quantities on the side of reform, 
which is rare. 

A clear, white space in the conduct column under 
the name of a nearly-normal lad old enough to grow 
a beard means nothing reformative, if such as his 
trade, scholastic, and military markings in parallel 
columns are lower than negative. Such a lad is 
guilty of what criminals call "stalling," which means 



156 Stop Thief 

he is not trying. If he won't try in prison, he won't 
try out of prison, and if he does not take respect- 
able knowledge and skill to a market ordinarily close- 
ly competitive, he will go down ; lacking sound prep- 
aration, the handicap of the prison mark alone will 
floor him. 

Thousands of habitual criminals are such because, 
when first-offending prisoners, they were suffered to 
fake their way through on conduct to a minimum 
parole, without having made a serious try for mark- 
ings that have to do vitally with the winning of 
honest bread in free life. And that is highly inform- 
ing, since exactly those who make the most noise 
about "giving the criminal a chance" are exactly 
those who fix their eyes as given, while they drive 
the indeterminate sentence as if it could be made 
to do no harm. 

In the first place, it is arguable as to whether the 
indefinite sentence should issue in capital crime 
against the person. The doubt looms up the larger 
because of the fact that where there is reasonable 
presumption against intent to kill, the law operates 
elastically in favor of the accused in America. 
Where such presumption is not in evidence, it is a 
precarious proceeding to employ a form of sen- 
tence, the very terms of which operate perforce of 
example to cheapen human life; for cheapening of 
human life is always one of the cardinal causes of 
disintegrating national forces. 



Reformative Regimes 157 

In the second place, you can not play both ends 
of the reform game against society. You can not 
make a felon's term of prison service elective by 
him to the last limit of liberality, and at the same 
time make the quality of his service alike elective 
during that term; you can not, short of reforma- 
tive averages shot to pieces in order to further in- 
defensible, short-term paroles. Neither can you de- 
lete from reform endeavor all of coercion and build 
to reformative averages ; you can not do that if for 
no other reason than the Turk's "Every man is as 
lazy as he dares to be," which is essentially appli- 
cable to the bulk of predatory felons, though it may 
remain essentially Turk otherwise. 

Nor does the number of paroles from a given 
institution of reform, for a given fiscal year, neces- 
sarily tell of the reformative efficiency of that insti- 
tution. Every lad may have been placed tentatively 
at work upon parole, and still leave the place charge- 
able with gross educational neglect. 

The largest parole list may mean the least, and 
the smallest the most of reform. That will depend 
upon the balanced fitness of the paroled to stick 
where placed in free life and fight for better fare, 
concerning which a clear conduct record is a mere 
incident, shall a capable lad not have responded to 
the vitally important call for all-around schooling. 
Shall he not have done so under a form of sentence 
shorn of all but the semblance of repression, he 



158 Stop Thief 

leaves the State choice in common sense neither of 
inference nor of action. Palpably, he should be ex- 
cluded from the parole list and required to dig dili- 
gently for basic results. Then, and not until then, 
should his conduct record receive serious considera- 
tion. 

Where and when sentiment can be made service- 
able, there and then it should be employed ; that, not 
only, but with a patient wholesouledness which leaves 
a prisoner not a stone to stand on shall he refuse it. 
Nothing short of generous justice tempered with 
mercy can meet the last exaction of a fellow who is 
more or less victim of unfortuitous circumstance, 
even unto that which the Wassermann test so fre- 
quently reveals. But the appeal of his limitations 
does not end there. As surely it is for a course of 
education and training which shall groove his 
thoughts to his duties and responsibilities as a man 
and social unit, rather than to his rights and privi- 
leges as a prisoner. Shall he refuse sentiment cal- 
culated to put him in the former frame of mind, 
while persisting in the latter, there is nothing for it 
but to hold sentiment in reserve until its reentry is 
called by respect for it on his part; else we shall 
have vulgarly commonized sentiment to no purpose 
other than to leave it in contempt in a falsely-con- 
struing mind. 

Of that fact the after-parole record is eloquent, 



Refor+mative Regimes 159 

yet it has been quite the vogue in America to in- 
sinuate prisoners into the belief that they are mis- 
used when not allowed to trifle along the lines of 
their choice. That has resulted naturally in reform 
at low pressure with such as the banjo, baseball and 
the pug-ugly on the boom, and a daily schedule of 
work so broken as to bear no semblance to the free- 
life working day. And that has been to extract the 
last of sting from the consequence of crime. Impris- 
onment which runs to one or another form of horse- 
play is the baldest of bids for the predal felon. 

The very terms of the indefinite sentence pre- 
supposes high-pressure reform in reason, else the 
very terms of that sentence must operate to defeat 
reform. The average young felon in America makes 
his parole from a reformatory in about fifteen 
months. Thousands of them have made three and 
four paroles from reformatories, from whence they 
took not enough in their brains and at their finger 
tips to command the wage of an apprentice in nor- 
mal times. A criminal won't work for such a wage; 
hence, mainly, the repeater and habitue of prisons 
of last resort, and hence the responsibility for him, 
in appreciable degree, of those who pander to his 
depraved instincts rather than prescribe for his 
sore needs. 

Every general rule has its exceptions, both as to 
the good and the bad; therefore the genuine crim- 



160 Stop Thief 

inologist is sparing of general rules. But, if a man 
tells of a prison of any grade in which there is next 
to no friction, he tells of a prison wherein efficiency 
gives place to compromise with criminal instinct. A 
thousand, say, of nearly the worst men a State can 
scrape up, do not bend, unqualifiedly and to a man, 
at any given time, even to the will of the Almighty. 
Anyone who can flash a smile, crack a joke, and 
avoid the rough edges of prisoners can keep them 
good-natured; but it takes a master man and crim- 
inologist to win the voluntary support of a prison 
population for reformative averages throughout the 
system. For him who persists in that there is sure 
battle with a minor percentage of recalcitrants who 
would neither give nor take a reformative hand, 
were they left to freedom of choice. Such prisoners 
must be handled with extreme tact and care, yet 
without capital compromise, else they will influence 
weaker, if intrinsically better, comrades, who are 
pulling hard against the criminal stream. Gentle- 
men tell a different tale; indeed, one that reminds 
of frosted sweets ; nevertheless, it is garnished with- 
out regard for the vital interests of exactly that 
class of prisoners from whom the most of capital 
crime flows. Furthermore, we may rightly rate such 
prisoners to be ordained criminals, only when they 
shall have been given a fair chance to cast off handi- 
caps either acquired or thrust upon them. 



Reformative Regimes 161 

Concerning the bulk of alleged prison reform of 
recent years in America, Americans have declined 
to think, even so far as indicated in the preceding 
paragraph. Had they given that little of thought 
to a big question, they had shunted divers flimflam- 
mings; flimflammings so transparently cheap that 
to try and not be able to see through them verges 
close to an offense against intelligence. 

Because the American people had accepted un- 
thinkingly the conclusions of pacificists at their face 
value, while refusing the counsel of those fitted and 
trained to search out the beast in the heart of man, 
the toll of lives of America's most precious sons 
was taken by the late debacle. Because the same 
people have yielded nearly unlimited power to do 
and undo to ultra-pacificists of reform, thousands 
of savable offenders have been aligned with the like 
of the Chicago and New York terrorists. 

The latter ominous sign but bespeaks a bad busi- 
ness begun. So long as reform regimes are written 
by those whose credentials thereof are next to nil, so 
long will the lerna worm of lawlessness draft the 
more of the ugliest of its heads on the body politic. 
And the gauge of lawlessness is as the hourglass of 
a nation's life. So the sand has run, so it will. 
Other causes will be contributory, but the germ of 
national suicide resides primarily in the hand that 
is raised against the law of the land. Gripping that 



162 Stop Thief 

hand, what figure persists in pen-pictures of dying 
nations with the reformer who was deluded when he 
was not a demagogue? 

There is no other way out but to hark back to 
common sense born of cosmic truth; to first off as- 
sure the public safety, if we are to cohese a polyglot, 
cross-bred people for intrinsic American expression. 
Specifically, we have no choice but to demand that 
prison regimes shall be purged of pernicious frills 
and thrills chargeable more than any other one in- 
fluence with America's constantly mounting sum of 
criminal recidivists. That is as certain as it is that 
the tearing down, as well as building up, can be 
entrusted safely to those only who understand why 
it is that a rational substitute is yet to be devised 
for a correctional institution for adult city-bred 
felons, wherein "Work is worship" — preferably un- 
der a trades-scholastic-military regime rationally 
prosecuted. 

Criminals who fetch, carry, and fairly ooze crim- 
inality can be depended upon to berate any reform 
schedule which does not court criminal subterfuge 
designed to force nugatory compromise. Once that 
basic fact breaks into the American mind, they will 
pass who tie to the obliquely-conceived schemes of 
criminal rounders. Then should respect for natural 
and man-made law be established within prison 
walls. Then should crime-tainted prisoners actually 



Reformative Regimes 163 

have "a chance" to prepare themselves for lawful 
activities in free life. Then habituals who do not 
accept that chance should not be suffered to drag 
down those who would otherwise elect to pull up and 
pin their faith to honest coin. And then criminal 
law, backed by public opinion, should proscribe ex- 
tremes in prison management. 



CHAPTER V 

CROSS-MATCHED CORRECTION 

Imagine Yale seniors to be ticketed for Yale's 
year-round sporting events, and other classmen rele^- 
gated to the usual grind on the days of those con- 
tests: would study markings go up, or down? 
Wouldn't ill-concealed resentment react against the 
spirit of the student body, and wouldn't the reaction 
carry to prospective sons of Yale? What would be 
the general effect, throughout the year, of such a 
policy? 

The object of this writing is to make it clear that 
when correctional measures do not correct, they do 
not, appreciably because of enervating contrasts 
akin to that assumed in the initial sentence of the 
above paragraph. 

Consider a case in point: On the outside, it takes 
a young man from five to seven years to become a 
journeyman mechanic. He serves from two to three 
years ere he is rated an intelligent apprentice. In 
either instance, he works approximately eight hours 
each day. Observe, in contrast: The average, first- 
offending felon is utterly unskilled, either as to a 

164 



Cross-Matched Correction 165 

trade or occupation, when he is sentenced, indeter- 
minately, to a reformatory. Nevertheless, he makes 
his parole therefrom, on the average, in close to fif- 
teen months. Therefore, must there not, "on the 
average," on the very face of things, be a leak some- 
where, as to his status on parole? 

Aside from the handicap of the prison mark he 
carries, can an ex-inmate who had worked at a trade 
approximately four hours each working day com- 
pete, as "an intelligent apprentice, 55 with his fellow 
in free life who had worked three times as many 
hours as he at that trade? Can he, essentially, if 
along about the ninth month of his confinement he 
is plucked from his trade instruction to engage in- 
differently on the institutional farm, or to mix con- 
crete on a public thoroughfare? 

Farming, thoroughly taught to a lad who elects 
to pursue farming as a vocation, is excellent proce- 
dure. We need more farmers cultivating more farms ; 
and since good roads should encourage for more 
farms and farmers, road building can be made ex- 
ceedingly serviceable at once to the State, and par- 
ticularly to circumstantial offenders who are classed 
as roustabouts. 

But why, in any case, scramble schooling? Why, 
intrinsically why, lift a lad from expert instruction 
at a prime trade, just at the time he should be tak- 
ing on the most of marketable skill, in order to place 



166 Stop Thief 

him temporarily at work he would not follow volun- 
tarily in free life for a month, — not for any man's 
money? Why break his hold on a big thing and 
reassign him to putter at an avocation he will spurn 
the moment he plants foot on free soil? Why, as 
well, should common and uncommon schooling and 
fundamental training go by the boards along with 
his instruction in the hand-tool processes? 

At colleges the situation is saved, measurably, in 
that no favorites are played; albeit educators and 
mentors have their hands full in attempt to steer 
bucking young bronchos clear of the corrosive by- 
products of pure sport. 

In walled correctional plants the few are chosen 
for work in the open, though nearly all believe they 
should be. Hence more or less of resentment is felt 
by those who miss the mark, since comparative lib- 
erty, under comparative freedom of action, makes 
the strongest of bids. 

However, the point to be stressed is : that the at- 
tention of the mass of lads is distracted from basic 
bread-winning effort and given over, in pernicious 
degree, to mental images of actual practices which 
can have but incidental bearing on their social re- 
habilitation. The primary effect is to hold up con- 
secutive, concentrated endeavor. The secondary 
effect is to leave a lad but casually acquainted with 
the rudiments of a trade at which he had had nine 



Cross-Matched Correction 167 

months of instruction; instruction at which he had 
"faked" and malingered largely because he was mo- 
tivated as indicated. 

There is no guesswork about our asseverations. 
They are wrung out in constantly lowering averages 
which eat to the very heart of reformative proc- 
esses. For this, the blame rests mainly with lay re- 
formers (?) who plan reformative (?) regimes in, 
compromise with the instinctive reactions of oblique- 
ly-thinking, wrongly-pointed lads, instead of in ac- 
cordance with their crying needs. That, not only, 
but further in fateful disregard of their unique ex- 
actions. And that, while gentlemen stress paradoxi- 
cally the obvious necessity for special training and 
disposition of the comparatively deviated. 

As a matter of fact, careful analysis discloses the 
average felon to be more or less abnormal; but let 
us stick to our specific last and further clarify with 
a concrete example: A Simon-pure "moron" pulls 
nearly straight, as to conduct, for nine months, and 
since conduct is wrongfully held to govern, he is 
then gratuitously transferred from all of interlock- 
ing training and education, to such as the pick and 
shovel. He is, notwithstanding that, being a "Simon- 
pure moron," he had arrived, so to put it, at no 
better than on speaking terms with the working tools 
of his inside, educative activities. He had, partly 
for the reasons advanced, and partly because he 



168 Stop Thief 

could not pace to the pace of his better-equipped 
comrades. 

Bar physical exigency, then state a defensible 
reason for his transfer? Do it to negative that of 
which he is cheated, plus the fact that he could not 
if he would — and he won't because he isn't built that 
way — get anything lastingly worth while out of pas- 
sive motions connected with a kind of hard work 
which is foreign to his natural and acquired attri- 
butes. 

Mentally, even physically, our subject is not un- 
folded, and he will not be until time and the best that 
men can devise shall have been given a fair chance to 
waken the dormant man in him and help him make 
himself over. Following the plow won't do it — if he 
would follow ; neither will such as the abstract process 
of mixing mortar — if he would mix, and stick at it. 

It is engaging, if a bit tragic, to whirl mentally 
around the cycle of alleged prison reform. Three 
decades back the would-be bellwether was going 
strong for straight-out trade teaching with part 
processes eliminated, — and he was warm on the right 
scent. A decade farther on, he was trapped with 
the complex idea of padding the prisoner's virtues, 
palliating his faults, passing up exactions imposed 
upon him by a competitive social scheme, deleting 
all of effective disciplinary control of him, and parol- 
ing him on the strength of his conduct record, even 
though he had not made a saving bid for trades 



Cross-Mat chect Correction 169 

and associated averages. To-day, he is for God only 
wots what. The writer would not risk an opinion, 
save that the panacea for crime is to so order society 
and prison regimes that it and they shall prescribe 
and proscribe to square with the instinctive reac- 
tions of by-choice criminals. 

Having, at any rate, reduced in method at the 
prison end to the level of the parasital "pug-ugly," 
and in speech to his gutter "guff"; in the social 
sphere reached into thin air for fantasies of preven- 
tion and cure; and on the bench juggled the basic 
bones of criminal law, we have the product that 
always issues out of contact of extremes; which is 
to say specifically: a constantly mounting number 
of flippant, gun-hung thugs riding rough shod over 
sun-lit thoroughfares. 

Just why the average lay reformer won't stick to 
the middle of the road but chooses to splash in the 
impossible going on either side is hard guessing, 
save so far as itch for applause and power of the 
ego-centric, or the projected vaporings of the idio- 
syncratic, explains. 

Even so, commonly emphasized by settings, and 
lights, and individuals grouped for the effect sought, 
citizens who would abide by law needs must, in the 
end, demand balance sufficient to assure that dia- 
metrically opposed processes of training shall not 
fight each other in the same prison. Also, they will 
of necessity insist on the salting of "on honor" 



170 Stop Thief 

banalities, carried to the mirth-provoking, and yield- 
ed, as it washes out inevitably, practically into the 
hands of the cunningest and most cruel of criminals ; 
criminals who engineer closed schemes the like of 
which the government of the United States would 
not, for a moment, turn over for prosecution to 
West Point cadets, not a half dozen of whom, from 
1804 on, have smirched the escutcheon of Alma 
Mater. 

Much has been written betimes about "waves" of 
crime here and there in, or as common to, continen- 
tal America. Many effusions have declined common- 
sense analysis, while hinting at the occult, or at least 
at the intangible. 

Such soporific writing hasn't done and won't do. 
It hasn't and won't because the pendulum of crime, 
like all else here below, swings unerringly to effect 
from cause. The habitual thief never happens. The 
murderer always murders from motive, or motives, 
sufficient unto himself. But the last reason for either 
would involve syllabication of influences exerted 
upon him from the cradle up, say nothing of that 
which was born with him and buried with his ances- 
tors. 

Beyond question, the arc of the pendulum of the 
kind of crime that counts has steadily lengthened 
in America during recent years ; but there has been, 
and there is, nothing abstruse about it. 

Stripped of false analysis that has run to ver- 



Cross-Matched Correction 171 

biage and buncombe, the brutal truth is that Amer- 
ica has bid, put up, put down, and put through for 
the commission of crime. For one, cardinal thing, 
and from the early '80's on, particularly, she has 
put a constantly cheapening price on the taking of 
human life. That culmination is markedly charge- 
able to her having drawn the sting of certain of 
the enacting predicates of penal law; and that om- 
inous procedure is nowhere more manifest than in 
prisons to which confirmed and capital criminals 
are "sentenced to hard labor," but wherein they do 
precious little of sweating while they thresh out old 
villainies and concoct new ones ; thresh them out while 
they "fake" super-sentimentalists into the belief 
that they are consecrated to chimeras of reform. 

So-called "waves" of crime are at bottom but log- 
ical expressions either of basic law unmade in the 
making of subsequent and nugatory laws, or of basic 
law rendered inoperative through loose, even maud- 
lin application of it, in and out of prison. 

An instance of the former is class legislation to 
which was lent Constitutional ukase for the "picket 
line.'* In very essence the picket line is the outpost 
of militant illegality, was meant to be by those who 
pressed for it, and must be reconsidered if Amer- 
icans all are really to clasp hands for Constitutional 
Americanism. 

An example of the latter, garnished for good meas- 
ure with flowers and banquets for homicides, is: 



172 Stop Thief 

But one of three murderers is brought to trial; but 
one of ten is convicted in the degree charged; and 
but one of eighty suffers the death penalty. 

Even as to anti-social drives that may be charged 
in the broad to preparation for, and the events and 
aftermath of, the World War, naught is hidden be- 
yond our ken; although many will not care to con- 
sider that war as literally thrust upon us because 
of reasons essentially the same as those which ac- 
count for the bulk of current predatory crime com- 
mitted in America. 

As if to make binding the blockade against articu- 
lation of penal codes, Quixotic Wallingfords of re- 
form dip the laudatory pen only for prison regimes 
that have been well-nigh stripped of fundamental 
reformative means for combating the machinations 
of enemies of the social order. Such as trades teach- 
ing, scholastic instruction, military training that 
embraces benign body-building and mental quicken- 
ing, mechanical drawing, classes in nature studies, 
U. S. history, economics, and elementary ethics, all 
must be refused, or so restricted as to be rendered 
comparatively useless. 

And to feature what catholicons are natural re- 
formative measures damned with faintest of praise. 
Just to mention: (1) "Pug" Phelan besting "Kid" 
Connors in a wrestling bout. (2) "Slim" Stanowski 
dancing the latest abomination with "Wasco the 
Wop. w (3) Baseball so arranged as to games and 



Crpss-MatcK&d Correction 173 

"practice 55 of the institutional "nine," as to maim 
the daily working schedule, and distract the atten- 
tion of the mass of lads supposed to be "set" at 
work in the shops and departments. (4) Moving 
pictures flashed for the effect desired by the de- 
praved and obliquely-thinking, rather than to in- 
struct, enlighten and ennoble. (S) Nigger minstrels 
with trend to the level of the lowest. (6) The drama 
staged to stress the predal felon meanly "pinched," 
then held under undue duress by stony-hearted 
hounds of the law. 

As for that hated symbol of "repression," the 
badge of authority, why shouldn't hair-trigger foot- 
pads construe it a mark at which to shoot, when a 
cult of lay reformers contrive to belittle nearly all 
of correctional authority that declines compromise 
with criminal intent? 

"Well, anyway, repression doesn't repress," rebut 
the cult, with a loosely-strung slogan that crosses 
the ever-recurring threat of punishment condign, 
by the Almighty, of mere carnal sin. Moreover, 
man is "repressed" automatically out of the very 
law of his being. He pays as he goes, both with 
physical and mental pain, for his excesses. So 
Nature schools him for selection of essential values. 
Did she not do so, destructive metabolism had done 
for him— ages ago. 

Coming down closely to day and date, how other 
than through application of the last of "repres- 



174 Stop Thief 

sion" could Germany's iron heel have been kept off 
of the necks of nations? 

Reducing to the specific domain, one is naturally 
stupefied by finite achievement that affords Cons. 
"Knockout" Klein opportunity to batter recogni- 
tion out of the countenance of Cons. "Bull" Brown, 
called "Nig," for short; yet one clings to the con- 
viction that expressions of the kind initiate in re- 
gressive reasoning of the nature which held the Ger- 
man student not to "belong," until his face, or neck, 
or both, bore cicatrized evidence of the cunning of 
the sword arm of his student adversary. 

Sifting to the bottom of a bad business, we dis- 
close the usual, deadly contrast, wz., self-declared 
aesthetes of reform planning prison activities that 
serve to establish the instinctive blood spilling brute ; 
activities that operate as well to break continuity 
of rational thought and endeavor, and to groove 
lads for intrinsic fallacies that finally obsess them 
and leave them with marked distaste for worthy 
work. And think on it how little of encouragement 
the average free-life lad needs to go stumbling along 
the wrong sporting pike! 

November 11th, 1815, Schopenhauer wrote to 
Goethe: "But most of us carry in our hearts the 
Jocasta, who begs CEdipus for God's sake not to 
enquire further; and we give way to her, and that 
is the reason why philosophy stands where it does." 

Fit the above in application to public indifference 



Cross-Matched Correction 175 

to, and neglect of, the crime peril ; do it in the broad 
to embrace moral crime, which is the meanest and 
most far-reaching of crime, and you cover the bulk 
of primary causes for anti-social expression. 

Penal codes are not self-operative. Unless backed 
by alert public support, criminal law especially re- 
duces to the service of the atrophying muscle. 

When and where the public will is expressed but 
sporadically and lamely, if at all, either to make 
public servants answerable ; or to hold up the hands 
of the police division in its attempt to enforce the 
law, then and there the dirty-dollar demagogue will 
employ such tools as spurious officers of the peace 
to play fast and loose with criminals of all 
grades. 

Hence it is, cardinally, that the ranks of hold-up 
desperados are constantly recruited, and that they 
wait neither upon night nor the be-badged. Hence 
it is that even the gamest and best of the latter 
shunt the issue of automatic to automatic with the 
former. And hence it is that homicidal crime is ruth- 
lessly and flippantly perpetrated in America, and 
there approaches the level that obtains in Soviet 
Russia; indeed, people for people and the average 
degree of their cultivation, legal instrument for 
legal instrument, material condition for material 
condition, and opportunity for opportunity, Rus- 
sians are less to blame for the chaos into which they 
have been thrown, than are Americans for taking on, 



176 Stop Thief 

step by step and sheep-like, much the same as the 
present, Russian standard of government. 

Hyperbole? Ask any conscientious patrolman 
who would care to do his whole duty in any one of 
the crime centers of the land. Ask him if he isn't 
ever conscious of nearly prohibitive odds hung up 
against him in favor of the murderous parasite? 
Ask him if, at any time or place, he feels free to 
protect himself and society in agreement with the 
palpable meaning of legal prescriptions to which it 
is mandatory upon him to lend force under his oath 
of office? Ask any magistrate who sits on the crim- 
inal bench to mete out equal justice, immune to 
criminal cunning and girlish gush. Ask any crim- 
inal lawyer of long standing and public repute for 
plumbing at once to the heart of things? Ask any 
active agent of the Secret Service, or any man who 
has given of consecrated effort for nearly a lifetime 
to the sin-driven, while breaking bread with them? 
Ask all why, fundamentally, a country that is 
uniquely well-ordered from the standpoint of consti- 
tutional law has to answer first off to itself for its 
criminals of all classes, and note substantial agree- 
ment, one with the other, of the replies. 

But driving Jocastas to the bald, ugly truth 
would be to disclose society's passive participation 
in common and uncommon rascality. That would 
take the edge off of dollar-making and pleasure- 
seeking, and put it on a sustained drive, all and 



Cross-Matched Correction 177 

together, for upstanding citizenship. And that 
would involve a whole lot of individual and collec- 
tive trouble, long-drawn-out ; for you can not heal 
the running sores of a nation in a fortnight. 

Of course the predatory criminal is all-pervasive, 
from the personal pocketbook, up and down; his 
shadow reaches to every human hearth; but to the 
unthinking many he seems far removed; and it is 
so much less pother to "view with alarm," whereas, 
resolve, — and "pass up the buck." 

Therefore the bulk of going specifications for so- 
cial and prison betterment have been drawn by camp 
followers who trek for spoils, and the devil decide 
the issue of battle : or by overwrought ego-centrists 
who spurn the cumulative experiences of men and 
nations, while they essay reversal of irreversible laws, 
both human and divine. 

Result? Spread any metropolitan daily, any day, 
and its flare-type captions will give indubitable an- 
swer; answer that can not be amplified in a bro- 
chure, but that can be put in a comparative word 
with statistics which adumbrate a constantly lower- 
ing national fibre and tone. 

Mr. Raymond B. Fosdick, Chairman of the Com- 
mission on Training Camp Activities of the War 
and Navy Departments, and under-Secretary-Gen- 
eral of the League of Nations during the World 
War, turns the trick in an article published in a 
late Sunday edition of the New York Times. 



178 Stop Thief 

Aside from the fact of Mr. Fosdick's refreshing- 
ly sound and cogent conclusions, his statistics, com- 
piled for the Bureau of Social Hygiene, are specifi- 
cally the most intelligently comprehensive that have 
been assembled, to our knowledge, by an American. 
They are quoted in full, that they may carry for 
their exceeding synthetic value: 

"Preponderance of crime in this country is aug- 
mented by unassimilated or poorly assimilated races. 

"It must not be supposed, however, that our for- 
eign and colored population is the sole cause of our 
excessive crime rate. If the offences of our foreign 
and colored races were stricken from the calcula- 
tion, our crime record will still greatly exceed the 
record of Western Europe. With all its kindliness 
and good nature, the temper of our communities 
contains a strong strain of violence. We condone 
violence and shirk its punishment. We lack a high 
instinct for order. We lack a sense of the dignity 
of obedience to restraint which is demanded for the 
common good. We lack a certain respect for our 
own security and the terms upon which civilized 
communities keep the peace. 

"As to the fact of our excessive criminality, the 
statistics furnish startling evidence. London in 
1916, with a population of 7,250,000, had nine pre- 
meditated murders. Chicago, one-third the size of 
London, in the same period had 105, nearly twelve 
times London's total. In the year 1916, indeed — 



Cross-Matched Correction 179 

and it was not an exceptional year — Chicago with 
its 2,500,000 people had twenty more murders than 
the whole of England and Wales put together with 
their 38,000,000 people. 

"The Chicago murders during this year total one 
more than London had during the five-year period 
from 1910 to 1914, inclusive. In 1917 Chicago had 
ten more murders than the whole of England and 
Wales and four more murders than all England, 
Wales and Scotland. In 1918 Chicago had fourteen 
more murders than England and Wales. In 1919 
the number of murders in Chicago was almost exact- 
ly six times the number committed in London. 

"New York City in 1916 had exactly six times 
the number of homicides (murder and manslaughter) 
that London had for the same year, and only ten 
less homicides than all of England and Wales. In 
1917 New York had six times more homicides than 
London, and exceeded the total homicides of Eng- 
land and Wales by fifty-six. 

"In 1918 New York had six times more homicides 
than London, and exceeded the total homicides of 
England and Wales by sixty-seven. This contrast 
cannot be attributed to the peculiar conditions in 
London induced by the war. In each of the years 
from 1914 to 1918, inclusive, New York had more 
homicides than occurred in London during any 
three-year period previous to the outbreak of the 
war in 1914. 



180 Stop Thief 

"Statistics of this kind could be multiplied at 
length. In the three-year period, 1916-1918, inclu- 
sive, Glasgow had 38 homicides ; Philadelphia, which 
is only a trifle larger, had during this same period 
281. Liverpool and St. Louis are approximately 
the same size; in 1915 St. Louis had eleven times 
the number of homicides that Liverpool had, and 
in 1916 eight times the number. Los Angeles, one- 
twentieth the size of London, had two more homi- 
cides in 1916 than London had for the same period; 
in 1917 she had ten more than London had. Cleve- 
land, Ohio, one-tenth the size of London, had more 
than three times the number of homicides in 191*7 
and approximately twice the number in 1918. 

"Equally significant is the comparison of bur- 
glary statistics between Great Britain and the 
United States. In 1915, for example, New York City 
had approximately eight times as many burglaries as 
London had in the same period, and nearly twice 
the number of burglaries reported in all England 
and Wales. In 1917 New York had four times as 
many burglaries as London, and approximately the 
same number as occurred in England and Wales. 
In 1918 the burglaries which the police reported in 
New York were approximately two and a half times 
those in London. 

"While war conditions undoubtedly served to 
heighten this contrast, they were by no means en- 
tirely responsible for it; in 1915 New York City 



Cross-Matched Correction 181 

had more burglaries than occurred in all England 
and Wales in 1911, 1912 or 1913. Chicago in 1916 
had 532 more burglaries than London; in 1917, 
3,459 more; in 1918, 866 more, and in 1919, 2,146 
more. 

"Even more startling are the statistics of rob^ 
bery. New York City in 1915 reported 838 rob- 
beries and assaults with intent to rob where London 
had 20, and England, Wales and Scotland together 
had 102. In 1916 New York had 886 such crimes 
to London's 38, while England, Wales and Scotland 
reported 233. 

"In 1918 New York had 849, while London had 
63 and England and Wales had 100. In each of 
the four years from 1915 to 1918, inclusive, New 
York City had from four to five times more rob- 
beries than occurred in all England and Wales in 
any one of the five years preceding the war. 

"Practically the same proportion exists between 
Chicago's robberies and those in Great Britain. 
Washington, D. C, in 1916 had four times the 
number of robberies that London reported; in 1917 
three times the number, and in 1918 one and one- 
half times the number. Los Angeles in 1916 had 64 
more robberies than all of England, Wales and Scot- 
land put together; in 1917 she had 126 more than 
these three countries." 

In a syndicated article sent out within the month 
by the Public Ledger Company, ex-President Wil- 



182 Stop Thief 

liam H. Taft sums up the case baldly in this sen- 
tence : 

"There is no opportunity of reform so great and 
no need of reform so crying as the change of our 
procedure in the prosecution of criminals." The 
word "prosecution" carries just social reprisal for 
felonious crime, inclusive of common-sense correc- 
tional methods following upon the sentence. 

But read it not so to creme-de-mint criminolo- 
gists. Mr. Fosdick's facts, "hard" as Gradgrind 
would have had them, cut no swath in the minds of 
members of the esoteric swivel-chair corps. The ex- 
President's conclusions are to be taken in reverse 
of the meaning given them. Criminals are rampant 
in America, and crime at once a national curse and 
menace, because purblind mortals fail on the one 
hand to meet hyenaized conduct through agencies 
cousin-german to those employed by "Mollie Make- 
Believe"; and, on the other hand, to capitalize the 
habits of thought and action of the blood-letting 
brute. "Scrambled" processes of intellection, again. 

The finishing touches are given self-determined 
law-breakers while they are being railroaded through 
conglomerate regimes of reform; regimes so ordered 
as to fight themselves all of the way, and to doom 
an increasing percentage of their charges for free- 
life failure, in that they are taught not enough of 
any one thing to establish them with the most me- 



Cross-Matched Correction 183 

diocre of skill in a market normally competitive to 
the point of elimination. 

All of which certainly "represses" the crowded- 
out derelict and causes him to have recourse to the 
like of the caveman's working tools. 

Here, a trades-scholastic-military regime is turned 
onto its head and held up, just at the wrong time, 
in impossible attempt to mix farming with the insti- 
tutional broth. There, looms a wrongly-placed agri- 
cultural plant, at which no better than rudimentary 
farming is taught lads, at least ninety-five out of 
the hundred of whom are city-bred, and who wouldn't 
work a farm for a living if offered, gratis, a quit- 
claim deed to it. In between are all grades of "rob 
Peter to pay Paul" schools of correction. At the 
end, convict prisons run particularly at present to 
psycho-analysis (the latest fad, essentially at the 
mercy of criminal cunning, and very far from being 
established by its sponsors with paired ideas that 
are mutually antagonistic), Welfare Leagues man- 
aged, as it so frequently eventuates, by the most 
heartless of subterranean crooks, and road-building, 
which can hold but a negligible minority of those 
tentatively employed at it, which as ordered is not 
economical in the final analysis, and which distinctly 
disturbs the endeavors of the mass in order specially 
to employ the few. 

Then intersperse freely with banalities that viti- 



184 Stop Thief 

ate, and sport outraged that brutalizes, and you 
have the body of the brief against reformative bung- 
ling. 

Having drifted supinely with the criminal tide 
and with those who have affected to correct the crim- 
inal with such as impracticable fads that reach to 
fantasy, if not beyond the pigeon-hole; platitudi- 
nous piffle; kindergarten reasoning with curriculums 
to match; and bestial bull-play reenforced by asso- 
ciate imagery and amusement that disintegrate the 
last reformative thought or process: and now that 
in consequence the acts of a swelling host of broad- 
day bandits are murderously directed the more and 
more against the common purse; that even the long 
arm of Uncle Sam is held in contempt by rapid-fire 
marauders, perhaps it will occur to the average citi- 
zen that if legal "repression doesn't repress 55 in 
America, he better get busy and lend a hand at 
making it do so. 

Rightly enough, however, to a degree, your true 
American cannot be moved to act by mere destruc- 
tive criticism. Could he, we should have long ago 
been most unfortunately embroiled with England, 
over Ireland's case. But crime in America knocks 
at every man's door; knocks, if with no more seri- 
ous menace than through a constantly increasing 
individual tax, direct or indirect, for the apprehen- 
sion, conviction, upkeep, and safekeeping of offend- 
ers against the public law ; the last item of which is 



Cross-Matched Correction 185 

become, in itself, an indefensible offense against the 
public pocketbook, the public safety, and the spirit 
and intent of penal law. 

If for no other reason than that escapes posi- 
tively disarrange the machinery of a correctional 
plant, while they switch the minds of inmates from 
rational endeavor to deviltry, they should be pre- 
vented. True, prisoners will now and then either 
outwit the authorities, or catch them napping; but 
to place ways and means of escape within easy 
reach, as is done commonly, is to edge dangerously 
close to criminal participation. 

In any event, the apprehension of an escaped 
felon should be made practically inevitable, and the 
terms of his original sentence to amerce with a fine 
of time to cover the outlay for his apprehension, the 
act itself, and the circumstances included within the 
act, — such, for instance, as murderous assault. And 
recollect that the escaped or escaping criminal may 
very well be the most desperately dangerous crim- 
inal at large. 

A few prisons and reformatories in the United 
States are relatively well-run ; but nearly all of them 
are tainted with the corrosive touch of the socially- 
blinkered dilettante, who aims to confirm a grip on 
correctional endeavor in toto, albeit his passing is 
demanded by every fact and figure that shadows 
forth false method. 



186 Stop Thief 

The ominous result of obliquely-thought-out med- 
dling with a great and grave work is precisely this : 
The burden of the fight with the predatory felon 
has been transferred from within prison walls to 
pedestrian-paced thoroughfares where, under cir- 
cumstances hereinbefore named, he stands the best 
chance of "getting away with it" and making his 
"getaway." Just so criminals have planned, while 
cunningly pulling the wool over the eyes of many 
whose earnest, self-sacrificing efforts were worthy of 
a rich reward. 

Beginning at the beginning of recommendations 
for amendment and repair, the first stroke must be 
to hold appointing powers to appoint neither the 
single-seeing extremist nor his antithesis as mem- 
ber of boards of managers of correctional institu- 
tions. 

The super-emotional visionary, and the hard-shell 
who wouldn't know what to do with a human heart 
throb should one hit him, are alike taboo. In the 
first place, they cannot be made to connect up for 
the common good; and, secondly, both are unfitted 
by nature either to prescribe or proscribe where 
criminals compound. The one will see in the hard- 
ened offender but a human heart side-tracked; the 
other but birch and bar for him who may not, at 
the moment, be moved actually by anything on earth 
this side of the kindliest of paternal approach and 



Cross-Matched Correction 187 

attack. Neither, of his own aiming, would bite the 
bull's-eye of synthesized reformative practice in a 
thousand years. 

The next, necessary procedure is to lift prison 
management, trunk and branch, out of politics. A 
work which involves formation and reformation of 
human character, and which begins where the Christ 
left it on the Cross, has no place for the wire-pulling 
politician and his head-felling axe. If there is an 
office on earth where the right man in place should 
feel secure to work out the most complex of prob- 
lems in accordance with the best light to be had, it 
is that of the head of a house of correction ; indeed, 
the time is not far distant when such heads will rank 
in the public mind with active heads of the advanced 
institutions of learning of the land. They will be 
so ranked because they will have to be, with pay, 
in order to fill a bulking order. 

Then induce practical men who have had to think 
and act, from the ground up, with for and against 
all kinds of humans, to engage on managing boards 
for fellows who have to be made over from the ground 
up; fellows who can not be socially rehabilitated 
through working from the clouds down, try how you 
will. 

Gentlemen who wouldn't think it sacrilege to name 
them the chosen of the Lord to lead in prison man- 
agement tell a different tale ; but the story halts 
here, as it must on high, with a cross-mixture of 



188 Stop Thief 

brute and Bunthorneism that has least of all things 
to do with the social reclamation of the recidivistic 
felon. The repeating criminal is the nucleus of the 
crime problem, and the deduction is inescapable. 

And then, in and for prisons and reformatories, 
carry on substantially like this: 

(1) Classify and locate the institution to agree 
with the kind of work for which it is designed and 
equipped. For examples: Situate farm-prisons in 
the center of the most productive of farming areas ; 
place trades-scholastic-military plants nearly equi- 
distant from the big cities of the State, favoring 
the capital city thereof. Thereby the cost of trans- 
portation of prisoners to prisons, and therefrom 
to the destinations of the paroled, would be mini- 
mized. 

It is a nice question as to whether or no the man 
on parole should be returned immediately to the 
locality of his comradeship in law-breaking. How- 
ever, home is home, dear ones are dear to all. Prob^ 
ably the sane view is that if such considerations 
would make but tentative appeal in a given case, our 
man would go where he listed anyway, and rules 
governing parole go hang; in fact, it so comes out 
frequently in the parole wash. 

(2) Whatever the intrinsic character of the insti- 
tution, and it should have and maintain intrinsic 
character, run it absolutely true to its name. If, for 
a third example, it is even the one "short-time" con- 



Cross-Matched Correction 189 

vict prison from which prisoners are to be employed 
on the public highways at road-building and the like, 
man and equip it throughout for the specific work 
in hand. 

For this prison, a central location should be 
chosen within easiest reach of supply service of re- 
lated supplies. Transportation of men and ordinary 
paraphernalia for work to be made by auto-trucks 
specially designed for the purpose. Then pitch 
tents, make camp, and go to it. 

Inside activities should complement those of the 
outside in such as bricklaying, stone-cutting, lath- 
ing, plastering, grading, shoring, ditch-building, 
practical instruction in concrete construction of all 
kinds, and in road-building to embrace all of its 
more common difficulties, inclusive of pontoon con- 
struction. Bind the parts with elementary courses 
in draftsmanship and surveying, and in applied 
mathematics for those able to reach thereto. 

Instructors should be expert in their line, and 
keen-sighted camp guards most carefully chosen, 
first, for their natural ability to handle men with- 
out serious friction, and, second, for a saving knowl- 
edge of the kind of work they are to supervise. 

Reduce traffic of prisoners from the inside out 
and the outside in, to the last, essential trip, either 
by individuals or in group. 

Elopements should be prevented at all hazards. 



190 Stop Thief 

When consummated, they should be construed and 
handled as specified. 

(3) Hold to the cardinal purpose of the plant. 
If the plan is to turn out well-advanced artisans 
and office men such as bookkeepers and stenogra- 
phers, stick to the specific last. Refuse all of putter- 
ing with activities that cross the plan. At agricul- 
tural prisons, let intensive scientific farming hold 
the boards to the exclusion of all else save common 
schooling, the blacksmith shop, and a common-repair 
shop where instruction is given in the handling of 
machines and tools with which the successful farmer 
must be familiar. 

Ready objection to the effect that such a scheme 
would be non-economical will not hold water. In the 
first place, a mixed prison, — say farm and indus- 
trial, — pays better than dollar for dollar as com- 
pared with open-market buying for its home-grown 
farm products. Secondly, actually "intensive and 
scientific" farming by the State would yield quanti- 
tative and qualitative results now approached but 
in isolated instances. And, thirdly, and most impor- 
tant, means cannot be devised by which activities 
that are diametrically opposed, both in principle 
and execution, can be made to complement each 
other in the same prison, either for reformation, or, 
in the final reckoning, for monetary profit. Dairy- 
ing alone is perhaps defensible, under special and 



Cross-Matched Correction 191 

unusually favorable conditions, as a detached arm 
of a walled plant; even so, it should be prosecuted 
by those housed, fed and schooled in buildings built 
without the walls. 

(4) Having fitted the institution for the man, fit 
the man to the institution. Beginning at the begin- 
ning again, sentence habituals to prisons of last 
resort and hold them there as specified in preceding 
paragraphs, under piece work, the proceeds issuing 
from which should at least cover the cost of their 
upkeep. Commit city-bred lads to industrial re- 
formatories classified from first-offending up to the 
next to the convict prison. Reserve farm-prisons 
for those who will elect to pursue farming for at 
least one year after parole. Send to "short-term" 
prisons habitual rounders who commit crime occa- 
sionally not because they are instinctively criminal, 
but for the reason that they are natural drones 
who have nothing commanding at their finger tips, 
or in their brains, with which to do. 

Barring habitual and capital criminals from the 
consideration, some latitude should be allowed the 
convicted felon as to selection of the correctional 
institution to which he is to be committed; but his 
choice should be substantially made and he held to 
it through all of ordinary circumstance. Transfers 
from prison to prison are expensive, and positively 
disruptive at both ends, — say nothing of the fact 
that an unskilled man will get nowhere flitting about 



192 Stop Thief 

like a butterfly, as those do who are struck with the 
wanderlust, and misbehave purposely in order to get 
transferred. 

In any case, the religious aim should be to hold 
a prison intact in the prosecution of its essential 
curriculum. Nothing can be gained through com- 
posite instruction the parts of which do not gibe, 
and cannot be made to do so. You can buy a gilded 
imitation of most any little article in a department 
store; but if you want a bauble of intrinsic worth, 
no matter how small, you will have to pay for it 
where it is sold. 

(5) Select lay managers from territory imme- 
diately contiguous to the plants, and select them 
for their natural fitness for the specific manage- 
ment. For a farm-prison, for example, could one 
name a better managerial staff than the most intelli- 
gent of up-to-date farmers ? How many farmers are 
on farm-prison boards? 

So local pride in good management should count, 
and the totally unnecessary long-haul railroad fares 
and associate expenses for board members and visit- 
ing parents, should be, in the main, eliminated. In 
the latter instance the drag is almost always on a 
pitifully lean purse. 

(6) Within the body of the plant, hold prisoners 
to concentrated effort consecutively put forth. De- 
sire for change and variety, common to all, should 
be discouraged consistently. Once a lad shall have 



Cross-Matched Correction 193 

selected his trade or occupation, or he is assigned 
to it on the strength of all of visible signs, more 
than a mere hankering for novelty should be de- 
manded of him before a change in his daily working 
schedule is effected. Just here is where the lamest 
of compromise is struck with the lamest of lads; 
lamest because they are utterly unskilled, while 
swayed by the instincts of the romany. Hence they 
bend grudgingly to the common will, and resist 
rightly-ordered endeavor; and hence they must be 
held to the reverse of their natural predilections, 
else by example and suggestion they will carry those 
predilections to and through the mass. 

It is easier than picking plums to "get along" 
with such men; no effort whatsoever is required. 
Just let them will, say through a chosen junta of 
fellow-prisoners, practically as to how they shall 
or shall not run to rope under a schedule of low- 
down sport and amusement that appeals to the in- 
stinctively brutal and depraved, and they will breeze 
along in a seemingly lamb-like atmosphere. In very 
fact, piece-work quantitive production may go up 
under such comparative expression of free will, 
which carries, of course, crass chatter charged wilK 
criminal schemes. But don't crowd for actual, quali- 
tative, reformative averages at any spot or place, 
or the house disciplinarian will be putting in half- 
time overtime. 

Again destructive propagandists will deny, — in 



194 Stop Thief 

the face of a parole record the truth concerning 
which cannot be expunged from Mr. Fosdick's fig- 
ures, assembled in deadly contrast, and verified, 
daily, by the capital type of the public press. 

What wants to sink into the public mind is : that 
the submerged fraction of habitual criminals always 
constitute the kernel of the crime problem in Amer- 
ica; that fly-by-night schemes of reform leave them 
socially dispossessed; and that prison pussyfooting 
makes the same impression upon the ninety-and-nine 
of them, as does water on a duck's back. They may 
take a sparing dip here or ostensibly immerse there, 
but nearly always with ulterior design tacked to 
visions of an early parole to a more fortuitous swing 
around the criminal circle. Therefore their sentences 
should be nothing other than indeterminate, their 
paroles contingent upon the manner in which they 
react to fundamental reformative processes, and 
their conduct records considered as bearing but in- 
cidental relation to their fitness for free-life inter- 
course. 

The last two counts have been reversed in order 
of importance in most of prison management. 
Hence, largely, it is that the American recidivistic 
criminal long ago wrested the palm from the Apache 
of the Paris boulevard, and holds, unchallenged, all 
of the world's criminal records for his class. 

Let it also sink into the public consciousness that 
fulsome praise of a given prison regime by actual 



Cross-MaticTidd Correction 195 

criminals leaves that regime at once suspect. Wher- 
ever consistent endeavor is given over to basic re- 
formative activities, there more or less of a fight is 
ever on with the by-choice predatory felon; how 
much of a fight, and for how long, will depend upon 
all-around conditions and circumstances which can: 
not be enlarged upon here. True, with equal justice 
meted out to all in a paternal spirit, the bulk of in- 
stinctive agitators soon find themselves so greatly 
in the minority as to make mock-heroics hardly 
worth while; but the fight is ever on. 

Those who refuse to adjust should be promptly 
isolated and kept isolated, while treated purely as 
the individuals they are, until they shall have given 
evidence fairly presumptive of their determination 
to do it the State's way. Thereof there must be no 
ruthless brutality; not any of heaping reprisal; 
much of kindly, long-suffering patience; but not an 
iota of compromise with evil intent out of an evil 
heart. 

The best of tools for the work, human and mate- 
rial, are presupposed. The present "penny wise, 
pound foolish" policy of skimping correctional 
plants in the matter of handicraft and other neces- 
sities simply means that the work must be done but 
badly, at the best. That means non-reformation; 
and that means doing it "over and over again," and 
then again, which, in every way, is the most expen- 
sive way. 



196 Stop Thief 

Whether or no the American people shall be 
brought quickly, as quickly they must, to knowledge 
of the fact that the crime peril is the extremest of 
all perils confronting them, remains with the people 
themselves. It can not be shifted much longer onto 
the unsupported shoulders of agents of the law; 
and it can not be solved by emotionalists, blinkered, 
save for short-sighted single-seeing. 

Compared with even so vital a question as the 
immigration question, the crime question stands as 
mountain to mound. There is nothing for it, first 
off, but to reestablish the mighty dignity of the gen- 
eral law. Palpably, the places to begin that be- 
lated chore are in the courts and prisons of the land. 
Otherwise, lawlessness will give America, as it gave 
all other one-time capital nations, the final shove 
over the brink. 

We employ the term "prisoner" as signifying one 
deprived of liberty for having committed a felonious 
offense against the public law. So much, no more, 
of stigma is the term meant to carry. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE SPORTING INSTINCT RUN MAD 

Writing on sports, one can easily take to shal- 
low water. If he would hold off the huntsman who 
stalks him while he breathes, man must exercise in 
the wide open. There he shall not improve on a 
full-swing cross-country jaunt with a lilt of a lop- 
ing run, on the toes, over the level. 

Assuming the heart to be young, several out-of- 
door sports will serve, though none are so beneficial 
as the natural, evenly-balanced, two-sided motions, 
such as walking, running, rowing, skating, and swim- 
ming in free air. 

Swimming is excellent exercise. The mild shock 
given the periphery nerves and by them communi- 
cated to their centers is stimulating. The mean 
temperature of the body is maintained. Accelerated 
renovation is assured. And the benefit is positive 
to the nude body from sun and air bath, while the 
skin does its full one-fortieth of breathing. There- 
fore the movement to require of pupils of female 
colleges that they shall win their swimming diplo- 
mas has significance no less than to conduce for 

longevity. 

197 



198 Stop Thief 

Indoor sports are but makeshifts compared with 
body-free exercise out-of-doors. They are run off 
in a fetid atmosphere usually charged with the fumes 
of tobacco. That engenders breathing through the 
mouth ; that tends to become habitual ; and that ini- 
tiates irritation in the bronchial tubes, promotes 
catarrhal conditions throughout the respiratory 
tract, and may aggravate a tendency to serious 
organic trouble. 

The first duty of man unto himself is to set apart 
a period of each day in which to clasp the healing 
hand of Nature. The one who feels whole will most 
likely see whole and make the best use of himself. 

To object that his residence is twenty minutes 
from his business does not excuse a man for neglect- 
ing the call of his muscles. It does cause him to 
yield to inertia. That yielding holds him to a seat. 
His physical needs wax insistent, but he shrinks 
from a blessed ten-block walk. 

There is a vast gap between indifferent move- 
ments about a stuffy department, and legging it 
freely in the sunlight. The man bound down to a 
sedentary pursuit knows timorous exercise won't 
tone him up, but habit has him stalled. And so, 
out of specious laziness, our man reaches the final 
compromise: he will pay professionals to set him in 
motion. 

A Dervish dance done in the grand stand is good, 
in so far as it gets a young fellow into the free air 



The Sporting Instinct Rim Mad 199 

and sunshine; but it will not take him far unless he 
gets too close to the sporting fraternity, when his 
thinking and doing will be grooved along constricted 
lines running to crooked curves. So be it such as 
the "ponies," or a deck of cards, hurry his blood, 
he is heading to land hard. Once the casting of lots 
clutches him, not the sorrow-shot eyes of his mother 
will stop him; nor will the tear-washed face of his 
wife, fated for long-suffering, since the tyro has no 
more chance to hold his own with gamblers at their 
games than has a spider's thread in a sixty-mile 
gale. 

Gamblers and keepers of bawdy houses common- 
ly work hand in glove. The latter as commonly 
"stake" the former in lean times. Hence the little 
the gambler leaves the novice is often "steered" into 
the purse of the prostitute. Therefore one reason 
why so many criminals who were first grubbing 
gamblers are diseased, or sterile, or both ; and there- 
fore much of woman's life-long suffering, and so 
many babes who carry marks made by Moloch's 
branding iron. 

Figured out, it is clear enough. Professional gam- 
blers produce nothing. They are parasites who live 
on the earnings of others. They must win over and 
above drains on the purse such as for living expenses, 
transportation, room rent, fixtures, attendants, 
track privileges, paraphernalia, clerk hire, steerers, 
touts, and fillers-in. So much in sum total mulcted, 



200 Stop Thief 

most of it, from thin wallets, would care for every 
unfortunate in the land. 

And that is not to trace the gambler*s unearned 
increment, the bulk of which circulates through 
channels where corrosive sin eats into flesh and soul. 
Nor does it dig to corruption funds with which 
trained-fingered gentry dog cupidity. It does not 
disclose how the weight of the gambler's influence, 
money and vote always operate to flaunt civic vice 
and graft. And it does not make a crude guess as 
to how many Americans have side-stepped morality 
under the cumulative pressure of gamesters* coin 
and wiles. 

Many a poor devil has "done his short bit 5 * in 
lieu of a longer prison term for which he knew he 
would have been "framed" and given over, had he 
"uncovered 55 higher-up spoilsmen. Many another 
hard-pressed under-dog has been kept under because 
the mother 5 s voice in him would not hush while he 
was being harried to do dirty work. 

Under heel or overlord ; piker or plunger ; whether 
he parts with pittance or patrimony, the most un- 
sophisticated lay gamester has it he is "down on 
his luck. 55 True for him, in the sense that Dame 
Chance returns but few consistent winners, and they 
of speed and stamina to stand a gruelling through 
the stretch; yet the fact remains that whatsoever 
he is "down 55 on, he is up against combination, con- 



The Sportmg Instmci Run Mad 201 

tusion, manipulation, inside information, and the 
law of averages. 

While paying dearly along the route, our man 
gathers a modicum of the means by which lambs are 
clipped by crooks, but the partial awakening comes 
too late. Chaining him, the gaming habit has well 
nigh paralyzed his sense of proportion. Most all of 
life now centers on his mania to win. He has it! 
Yea, he will reave the reavers! How? Why with 
a "system," an "unbeatable" system, of course, for 
not thinking out and playing which he blames him- 
self for having been so dull so long. 

He admits grudgingly that the gambler's cumu- 
lative percentage expressed in his working tools is 
an item, but he can't make his figures lose. Are 
they not "different/' in fact, unique? They are, if 
the acid test of play which bowled over thousands 
of expert craftsmen who elected to win with them 
makes them different. About that, the "bud" with 
the bit between his teeth hasn't been given the high 
sign. He won't be "let in" until he shall have taken 
his degrees in the guild, gambler knights whereof 
lend "a meaning all its own to every little move- 
ment." In any case, his deductions dovetail, and he 
rushes to "make a killing." 

Were he not gaming-intoxicated, he would con- 
strue it suspicious that the successive "doubling" 
of his bets, which "sure-thing" systems involve as 



202 Stop Thief 

a fundamental principle, does not feaze layers of 
odds, who still prod him to stake his pile on such as 
the turn of an ace. Or could he be satisfied to 
make a few lucky strokes, get even and quit, he 
might. Betimes the element of chance favors pon- 
derously the rankest "outsider"; but this unit of a 
grand army has billed himself through for long- 
time, consecutive play. Hence, since the percentage 
in favor of the gambler's game is fixed and ulti- 
mately unbeatable, the end of the trail commonly 
breaks to penury, frequently to peculation, and, if 
the tenderfoot is also tender-skinned, while no plod- 
der, then likely enough to a suicide's grave. 

The trite saw, "A sucker is born every minute," 
was probably toothed by a gambler ; a gambler whose 
mind localized the "easy mark" whip-sawed along 
the gambling course. Even at that the crass epi- 
gram but shadows forth an idea. It does not begin 
to cut to the bone. By and large, the minute-by- 
minute total in the United States of those who are 
destined to take anything from a nibble to hook, 
line and sinker of the gamester's cast won't fall far 
short of ten per cent of the whole. 

Trace the trickster from leaning shack and 
"loaded" dice to inlaid floor and juggled stocks, 
bidding which while prancing on his toes, the margin 
between man and fool is usually in reverse ratio to 
the margin the bidder essays to carry. Then think 
on it that a goodly eighty per cent of the plucked 



The Sportmg Iristmct Run Mad 203 

are money-minnows when not of the protrusile- 
Hpped tribe, who need little of urging to grasp at 
get-something-for-nothing straws ; wage-earners, sal- 
ary dependents, struggling professionals, and young 
men who ought to be hard-set at winning honorable 
spurs. 

Brokerage, alone, will eventually wipe out the 
small-fry margin operator, and the "rake-off" all 
the way down the line is relatively the same. Take 
any form it may, the insatiate maw of the "kitty" 
kills off the grubbing lay gamester; moreover, it 
would stall petty gamblers themselves were they not 
"staked" betimes by patricians of their class, to 
whom "setters-in" are useful in many subterranean 
ways. That is one reason why the cumulative skill 
and coin of the clan parasite is combined against 
the lay player. Should he get away with his own 
money often enough to count, say nothing of win, 
king-pin gamblers themselves would have to go to 
work. 

A trio of examples will give an idea of the per- 
centage in favor of the gambler's outfit in "straight" 
games : At roulette, it is 2.66 to 1 ; faro, about 60 
to 40; dice, banked by the house, 3 to 2 plus the 
"cut," which is a small amount paid to the house 
by the player each time he wins, and which amounts 
in the aggregate to approximately five-thousand dol- 
lars per week for pretentious houses. But not more 
than one gambling house in twenty-five is run "on 



204 Stop Thief 

the level," and that, as a rule, only in cities of 
the first class. In the rest, "transients" are "steered" 
to such as electrically-controlled roulette wheels, 
crooked poker games, sleight-of-hand faro dealers, 
"fixed" dice, and filched of their ducats. 

A graphic description of confiscation might read, 
"trying to beat a gambler at his game." At the 
race track alone an unusually keen lay player who 
knows the route, horse and man, who "plays 'em 
easy," and with whom the breaks in luck abide, has 
a chance to cash in to the good at the end of ex- 
tended play. Said a professional dealer of stud 
poker of years of experience to the writer: "I hav£ 
run across only one gambling house which wanted 
an honest dealer." 

With all given, consider that the gaming instinct 
is transmitted; is insidious and most tenacious; is 
interactive and all-pervasive while running to the 
bawd; is cumulative in its intensity, recklessness 
and brutality; is as strong in appeal as another; 
is swaying increasing thousands of men, women and 
youth on American soil, and you have a mouthful 
of explanation for hopples which college faculties 
are obliged to put on young bloods, whom the sport- 
ing instinct perverted and given free leg would else 
cheat of so much as a smattering of cheap cul- 
ture. 

Not all of progress resides in culture, nor of vir- 
tue in the bookworm; much of both depends upon 



The Sporting Ihstmct Run Mad 205 

developed muscle and stamina; but not a cubit of 
either has to do with death on the athletic field. 

It is freely denied, yet unfortunately true, that 
a type of student athlete cleaves by far too close 
to the bone-breaking gladiator. Moreover, the ex- 
boo ter, batter, and slugger who just skims through 
on his school marks is commonly wafted on a wave 
of enthusiasm to easy going in after-college life; 
whereas the serious scholar with serious aims usually 
has to creep warily in order first to secure, and then 
to hold down, a hard, meanly-paid job. That agrees 
with the sporting verities, but isn't it a bit tawdry, 
and very much overdone? Isn't it of the funda- 
mental offices of education to sort values while it 
teaches a lad consideration for the rights and ribs 
of his fellows? 

It is commonly wrung out in the social wringer 
that we place a ridiculously inflated valuation on 
the mere athlete whose mind runs to muscle and to 
monetary exploitation of muscle, developed and 
used to negative ends. That leverage accounts large- 
ly for loose cogs in the social conscience, such on 
the one hand as that clergymen of the State of 
Massachusetts of the Baptist faith were, at last 
accounts, paid the average, niggard salary of $1.87 
per day; and, on the other hand, that a pug-ugly 
demands and gets $150,000, "win or lose," for a 
twenty-round attempt to batter recognition out of 
the countenance of another pug-ugly. 



206 Stop Thief 

In other and pregnant words, for a few minutes 
of blood-spilling, a parasital brute has a higher mar- 
ket value than has the life-long labor of the average 
college-bred man of the cloth. Just that, every item 
of it; for it does but skim the surface of the tale, 
and does not salve the social wound to submit that 
the sporting fraternity put up the purses, to divide 
which distinguished pugs manoeuvre to "fake it," 
even betimes as to capital ring battles. 

The purses of the promoters of purses for punch- 
ers are fattened by whom? 

Prize fights, and the feeders for prize fights which 
are soft-pedaled to the public as "athletic exhibi- 
tions," but which are plumb plain fistic brutalities 
pulled off in enclosures euphemistically called "Ath- 
letic Clubs," are patronized by whom? Those enclo- 
sures are given over to pugilism and the gambler by 
whom? By whom are the most of four-figure bets 
placed at the big layouts spread from boundary to 
boundary the country over? Brace after brace of 
mere "bantams" of boys are egged on to cut and 
slug each other while the blood streams from both, 
where and by whom? 

It was but a few months since, and it was in an 
alleged bon-ton "Athletic Club," that five lads were 
"knocked out," nearly twice that many were disfig- 
ured to suit in from one to five "rounds," several 
other contests went to a "decision," the referee had 
to stop two bouts because one of the boys was too 



TTfie Sportmg Instmci Run Mad 207 

badly beaten-up to go on, and one pigmy "resigned" 
rather than take more of cruel punishment. Mark 
it that many of the lads engaged were tKe offspring 
of the newly-naturalized; mere striplings they, ex- 
ploited out of the finer sensibilities and sped on the 
road to degeneracy for the amusement of swallow- 
tail sports, by whom the majority of pugilistic 
abominations of the kind are sponsored and backed. 
By way of respite from indignation, mark it further 
with a laugh that nearly all of these same lads hailed 
either from Settlement House or Educational Alli- 
ance, whereof "Big Brothering of Boys" is touted 
as the singular, testamental card. We think no 
sacrilege while suggesting to gentlemen that they 
put it consistently and bluntly to their kid charges 
somewhat like this: Jab your way to Jesus. 

Concerning a vicious business of which the shroud- 
wrapped victim is a fitting symbol, take note of 
blows planted "below the belt"; of broken hands, 
arms, noses and jaws; of compound facial disfigure- 
ment featured for life; of pivotal bones wrenched 
from their sockets; of eyesight impaired and im- 
periled; of eardrums put out of commission; and of 
internal injuries destined to rise up both to plague 
and to cut off mature years. Then give a sound 
reason why Americans should wink the nether eye 
at near-Neroism, while prating to the immigrant 
of American ideals ; even pointing him to Holy Writ 
that partitions man's relation to man. Save the 



208 Stop Thief 

mark ! and save lads from guidance which gives them 
over to riotous expression of brutal instinct; the 
one instinct that calls above all others for curbing 
during the plastic period, because that instinct is 
at the bottom of all of war. 

At any rate, since the eighteen-foot prize ring is 
at present a legalized, popularized, hero-producing 
American institution, it is rank injustice which holds 
for manslaughter a man who lands a "fair" if fatal 
blow within the roped arena, and at the same time 
sneezes at "foul" and fatal blows, planned and deliv- 
ered within other sporting lines. 

Again it will be denied, but any football alumnus 
will tell you if he tells you the whole truth, that he 
has heard the word passed to "get" troublesome 
"star" performers of opposing elevens. Of course 
the "get" was meant to mean no more than "put out 
of business." Even so, what more of fateful sugges- 
tion could be employed where young blood hurries, 
young heads don't think all the way, and iron mus- 
cles in giant frames are wielding tremendous driving 
power? 

Like it or leave it, plain foul play at play is 
responsible for scores of slabs of sacrifice shot up 
in the graveyards of America, which symbols stand 
for the broken hearts of forbears who transmitted 
to their boys the land's best blood. 

Shafts of cold marble here in little Elmira's 
"Woodlawn" tell of such tragedies. One of them 



The Sporting Instinct Rim Mad 209 

befell a proudly upstanding broth of a boy whose 
huge grasp smothered your hand while he flashed 
a smile that went straight to the heart. Six-foot- 
two erect as a spar he stood, building as the acorn 
builds. But they "got" him; got him at prepara- 
tory-school football; got him "below the belt"; got 
the red-red roses in his cheeks and left him with 
cancer, and the long roll beating in a heart that 
loved life dearly. The writer was wont to pass an 
occasional word with the lad, a more frequent one 
with his mother, the last with her in a trolley car 
months after the death of the boy. There, with 
tears dripping from drooping hopeless eyes to lips 
a-quiver, she just managed the half -whispered, half- 
aspirated plaint, "I shall never get over it, — never !" 

Have you looked into such eyes and had words 
born of such bereavement branded on your memory? 
If you have you won't meet again with your own a 
like pair of eyes if you can avoid it; not, at least, 
until you shall have seen beyond a "sporting" nose 
that a sporting schedule outrages which delivers a 
broken lad on a stretcher from the field of recrea- 
tion to his mother. 

Another with whom the writer broke much bread 
was as finely a fibred, formed and featured a lad 
as ever trod a college campus. Him, a blue-eyed, 
peachy-skinned, golden-haired mother marked and 
crowned her very own and all. Scrupulously care- 
ful was he to yield breathing time to his adversary, 



210 Stop Thief 

of whom he would have asked no odds had he been 
a seventh son of Ajax. Out of this lovable fellow 
they literally crushed life; wedged him heacf on be- 
tween the pickets of an iron fence, and left him 
dangling there, limp and nearly lifeless, while tem- 
porary young maniacs howled, tore at, and disfig- 
ured each other over the possession of a walking 
stick. Since injury to the lad's splendid brain 
wrought irreparable ruin, it was a mercy to the 
mother that he did not open eyes charged with a 
horrible, bulging, fixed, and vacant stare. 

And, mind you, wounds immediately calamitous 
constitute but a fraction of afflictions chargeable to 
a perversion of the rational purposes of sport. In- 
juries to vital organs which ring but tinkling, if 
any, bells, in the elastic young, but which carry 
morbidity that makes itself felt near the medial line, 
build the body of the brief against the natural 
"roughneck"; the same who stamps somewhat of 
his personality and more of his proclivities on his 
betters in school life; the same with whom lads who 
do not train foul blows ought not to be allowed to 
measure physical prowess; and the same would-be 
boss bull of the field with whom real culture is a side 
issue, and the opportunity to step lively to sporting 
prominence the underlying motive. 

It is single-seeing error that puts the stamp of 
professionalism on sport that should be run to the 
good it can do. Considered just as sport, college 



The Sportmg Instmct Run Mad 211 

competitive sport will best serve the institution and 
the student when it shall enlist the full subjective 
efforts of the field tactician, and practically bar the 
human battering-ram. 

One of the effects of the professional coach sys- 
tem is to accustom lads to have most of their field 
problems thought out for them. That is to limit 
individual and collective study, initiative, and re- 
sourcefulness which, given proper direction, would 
enhance rather than hamper team-play. It is also 
to take much of the tang out of victory, and to 
tempt the shifting of responsibility for well-earned 
defeat. 

Another result is to discourage from the athletic 
field a vast number of the very ones who need most 
to take to and persist on that field, whether or no 
for competitive purposes ; and they would, were not 
the processes of elimination thereof so exacting, al- 
beit fallible, in the face of the fact that lads unfold 
differently in the matters of time and degree as per- 
tains to dormant attributes of mind and muscle. 

A vulgar case in point is that of the late middle- 
weight champion, "Kid" McCoy, who could have 
been hung on the ropes easily one year by young 
men who had to extend themselves to the limit to 
put a glove on him a year hence. McCoy had 
changed neither in weight, height nor reach. He 
had, in a few short months, of his own volition and 
"coaching," schooled his reflexes, feet and eyes to 



212 Stop Thief 

do his bidding; that was all, but exactly to our lik- 
ing here, since he was originally slow, lumbering, 
and a very poor judge of pace and distance. More- 
over, McCoy was held lightly originally by sluggers, 
and their "trainers," who ostensibly represented the 
b^st pugilistic brains in the country; yet he won to 
the top over all by so wide a margin that he was 
conceded to be in a class by himself. While he was 
at his best, no man of his weight wanted his game 
who didn't need gate money. What self-coached col- 
lege lads would foa&e to do they would do, as did 
McCoy. 

The professional coach is naught more awesome 
than the perfected pupil with ambition to excel and 
grit to back the ambition. Shall a lad not have been 
given the grit, the more reason to grind grit into 
him before he is ground in a crucible that recks but 
little of choice, and less of the finer sensibilities. 
For that, however, he need neither grind with, nor 
be ground by, elbows, feet and fists; quite the con- 
trary, in fact. 

Still another consequence is to extract from the 
flavor with which lads should battle for themselves 
and for Alma Mater. For a Harvard eleven which 
sports a Yale coach to best a Yale eleven would leave 
something to be desired, would it not? It wouldn't 
be a totally significant Harvard victory, would it? 
Wouldn't it be far better to go down fighting all- 
Harvard from post to post, then pull on sweaters 



The Sporting Instinct Run Mad 213 

and head for another and better planned and pre- 
pared try at it? 

As concerns the fundamental purposes of com- 
petitive sport, what is the essential difference be- 
tween victor and vanquished when the issue is de- 
cided by a last flash of gameness and skill? If, con- 
trariwise, defeat comes to the outclassed, is not the 
subjective bearing of the case the more binding? Is 
it not one of the most serviceable precepts of pure 
sport which decides lads of themselves to search out 
and make use of lessons learned in defeat? Should 
they do so, would not victory swing back and forth 
to the most beneficial ends in accordance with the 
changing weight of influence? 

A fourth indictment arraigns semi-professional- 
ism for making light of the lunge of the young sav- 
age, coin of his characteristics, and the level of 
them the level of those of his schoolmates. 

Whether lads are schooled in or allowed to drift 
into thuggish field assault is one in result and re- 
sponsibility. The very term "coach" should impose 
the primary obligation to imbue pupils with rousing 
contempt for "roughhouse" tactics ; and upon repre- 
sentatives of school authority the duty to watch 
it out at the side lines and insist upon that view, 
win or lose, under a professional coach or not. 

Athletic success that savors of the morgue is a 
scandalous perversion of high potential for good. 
Simon-pure accidents are inseparable from the best- 



214 Stop Thief 

regulated field of sport; but on such a field serious 
wounds will seldom befall. 

Because standardized American amateur sport 
puts a premium on the sprouting roughneck and his 
spurious attack, it is that the bulk of the scars, 
limps, and insidious hidden lesions taken at that 
sport are indefensible. Bid, put up, put down, and 
educate for it ; make brutal pawns in miniature war 
of lads at play, and what expect in full-blown war 
but all kinds of savagery, the meanest of which is a 
toss-up between that which resides in the bully's 
bones, and barter that dispossesses the one and en- 
riches the other. 

Hail, therefore, in the first instance, to German 
students who were held not to "belong" until their 
faces and necks bore cicatrized evidence of the cruel 
cunning of the sword arms of their adversaries ; and, 
in the second instance, to Americans who sold shoes 
with pasteboard middle soles, to be worn by storm- 
driven and death-dealt French soldiers in the World 
War. 

Facial disfigurement which issues from alleged 
play conceived in service to national ends is reac- 
tively bad enough, as Germany's present plight 
proves. But the impish trickster who defiles trans- 
oceanic trade with his pasteboard junk destined 
for the death-ridden in tempest! Shoddy stuff? 
Rather, and one reason why the Central Powers 
were so long at taking us seriously over the matter 



The Sporting Instinct Run Mad 215 

of our intrinsic obligations. Having, as individuals, 
smeared out of our pots of paint, foreign peoples 
came to believe that sort of thing adumbrated our 
national character. Nations of first rank have done 
much more damnable thing than has our own; but 
it remained for psuedo-Americans to debase trade- 
mark on foreign-billed goods. By so much we de- 
serve the dollar tag hung to us. 

It would be informing, perhaps amaze, could we 
know to what extent spurious sport was primarily 
responsible for that tag, because : habits of thought 
and action formed in youth and young manhood 
tend strongly to mark the course of the individual 
throughout life. Layer upon layer within the brain 
of every man are action patterns which he would 
destroy, but which are there to stay, if happily 
under arrest. 

And so, could we, we would take semi-professional- 
ism by the scruff and yank it out of amateur sport ; 
we would, because wheresoever that hydra-headed 
Lerna attaches, there safety sacrifices to speed and 
weight, principle to pocketbook, progress to victory, 
the game to the goal, and the cardinal interests of 
the mass to the cravings of a few for the sporting 
limelight. The first count of the foregoing para- 
graph is exampled in this biographical item from 
the pen of an enthusiastic admirer of a "whale of 
a coach": 

"And to see So-and-So sweeping down the field 



216 Stop Thief 

at close to a ten-second gait with his 200 pounds of 
bone and muscle poised for a flying tackle was 
enough to worry the bravest back who ever essayed 
to catch a punt and avoid the charging end." Pre^ 
cisely! And "enough to worry" mothers whose 
"bravest" will be borne down by much greater 
weight, speed, agility, football cunning and coarse- 
ness of fibre than their own, employed by rubber- 
muscled, ox-boned, boiler-tubed young plungers 
keyed to the last pitch with their minds glued on 
the goal-post of their opponents. The same singular 
gifts that make players of the latter class so danger- 
ous in attack, likewise hold them comparatively safe 
in defense; hence the biographer does not surprise, 
nor does he include in the statement that "So-and-So 
was never seriously injured." Could and would he tell 
how many lads So-and-So "seriously injured" under 
orders to "Tackle hard !" that would be at once in- 
forming and serviceable. And there is no getting 
away, all of the time, from the hard tackle. A lad 
can but take his medicine expressed in the cumulative 
odds against him, or stand convicted by his school 
mates a tin sport and a welsher. Anything but that 
for a game athlete; therefore broken bones, broken 
hearts, and baleful kinks in kinetic organisms. 

Run to open play with interference, football car- 
ries menace to spare; run mainly to the mangling 
mass reminiscent of the heaped dead at salient points 
on a battlefield, the game is a reversion to instinct 



The Sportmg Instmct Run Mad 21*7 

more barbarous than that which inspired Indian 
gauntlet lines purposed to test the stamina of 
sprouting "braves." It is more brutal because the In- 
dian lad's last sign of distress was heeded ; whereas the 
stretched-out American lad can't make that sign from 
under, in very fact may never again flex a muscle, 
and the writhing lad, likewise placed, won't make it. 

Thereto hangs a nasty, near-sighted tale, con- 
cerning which Tetrarchs of sport would have us be- 
lieve that the lad is deprived who is not slammed 
and banged all over the lot. Quite to the contrary, 
acquittal is not possible for method of play that 
results in something like a pyramided half-ton of 
impacted flesh and bone at nearly every attempt 
to gain ground. Under the law of averages, the 
thing works out mathematically thus: Resulting in- 
jury equals the physical resistance at a given point 
of contact, of a given individual, at a given time, 
to mass multiplied by momentum. 

Were the disciplinary officer of a reformatory 
allowed to inflict upon the persons of hundreds of 
inmates a year's total of corporal punishment equal 
to that often visited upon a single lad in a single 
football game, he would be haled before high Heaven 
as an instinctive brute, to whom the hardening proc- 
ess had done its worst. Further, and to our knowl- 
edge, some who would persist in the haling have 
taught young Titans to "Tackle hard!" 

If there is essential difference as between the 



218 Stop Thief 

imaginary and actual case stated, does it not reside 
in the motive? If the difference does reside in the 
motive, does not the greater blame attach to the 
lesser necessity? 

English football was born in 1346, American foot- 
ball practically in 1876. While reliable data in 
connection therewith is not obtainable, little is risked 
in the opinion that more of fateful hurts have be- 
fallen on American than on English football fields. 

"But," the common defense is framed, "consider 
the value of the 'hardening process' carried by the 
American game!" Decidedly! "Consider," by all 
means, inclusive of the unconscious lad; then con- 
sider from the viewpoint of parents in whom rights 
rest, and on whom duty is imposed; and then insist 
that tuition shall mean you intrust the whole of 
your lad, and not the mental half of him, to safe 
guidance. 

Insist, too, that in the matter of prospective so- 
cial service your one in college is worth at least 
three, on the average, in prison; and that study of 
the psychology and physiology of your lad is quite 
as incumbent upon his mentors and molders as are 
detached deductions concerning the mental, moral 
and physical attributes of fettered felons. 

Undue restriction of individual initiative would 
be most ill-advised; yet true it is that down-to-the- 
ground study of the student can be made only where 
he studies, and of the criminal where he is confined. 



TJi& S porting Instmct Run Mad 219 

On-the-spot operators trained for the business can 
best form or reform character. Robbing the stu- 
dent to pay the criminal does not serve the common- 
weal, and usually does deny the one in order to 
chase Will-o'-the-wisps of cure for the other. 

In any event, institutions of learning may well 
curb the mental wanderlust of members' of their 
staffs long enough to plan their curricula so that 
it will assure, in so far as objective prescriptions 
can, the physical well-being and safety of their 
charges. So much of local sociology is squarely up 
to college faculties the country over. 

Had the University of Pennsylvania done so much 
in due time, the freshman William L. Lifson would 
not have been suffocated ; nor would six other stu- 
dents have been seriously injured in a "bowl fight" 
had within the institutional confines a few months 
since. "Suffocated!" And out of brutifying of lads 
that ought not have been given a leg to stand on. 

Public opinion will have pressed for progress when 
it shall have charged educators and penologists alike 
with the last responsibility for results within the 
natural boundaries of their efforts. 

It is merely to crowd Washingtonian paraphrase 
to remind that a nation itself will usually neglect 
more important of its home affairs while meddling 
elsewhere; yet it goes far to explain why we are 
point to point with divers anarchistic manifestations 
within our own household. It also elucidates ominous 



220 Stop Thief 

facts with their corollaries such as that the joint 
homicide-rate of thirty leading American cities for 
the decade 1885-1894 was 4.8, and for the decade 
1905-1914 8.1, per 100,000 of population; which 
is to say: twenty-five-thousand more murders were 
committed during the latter than during the former 
decade. 

While the above figures mark much of the after- 
math of mad sport, they exclude the greater thou- 
sands of annual killings, an increasing minority of 
which reach into the domain of near disregard for 
human life. Such fatalities are due largely to per- 
version of the sporting instinct, or to suggestion 
that traces to that perversion. Killings and serious 
hurts taken on athletic fields are usually of the for- 
mer class. Twenty-five per cent of the 100,000 land 
disasters of 1915, inclusive of traffic injuries, would 
probably tale off measurably with the second speci- 
fication. A positive number of the 1915 railroad 
accidents in which 8,000 were killed and nearly 
200,000 injured reduce to part neglect superinduced 
by that which locks arms in measure with the sport- 
ing life. Sport-suggested speed frenzy alone is a 
growing menace which serves no necessity and con- 
serves neither health nor happiness. It would be 
pertinent, if grewsome, could we reach to the sport- 
ing roots of the 15,800 suicides for 1915; also, to 
the same roots of defalcations in the sum of $5,592,- 
693 for that year. 



The Sporting Instmct Rim Mad 221 

The worst done to the average of its victims by 
overdone sport at school is thusly classified in the 
interest of proper sequence: 

(1) It motives lads to pull with their parents 
for institutions at which they can put forth the 
most of sporting effort, and the least of real try 
for a rational culture. That the pull is potent, if 
masked, argues ill for their term marks. A militant 
minority of such lads always confront the faculties 
of institutions of learning that count most. 

A positive number of ex-college sports have swung 
long arms; swung them, in effect, to establish the 
unlettered wastrel. Otherwise it would not be that 
85 out of every 100 men in the country earn less 
than $18.00 each week in normal times; and that 
95 out of every 100 are but six months from the 
poorhouse at 65. 

Did college training market in America in the 
large by right of its intrinsic worth, it would inspire 
thousands of side-tracked lads to stroke to its oar; 
lads, a very great many of whom read with the 
graduated college sport for mediocre mental equip- 
ment. That is a supreme pity where preparedness 
can look up under educational facilities that are as 
well-balanced as any; where books on nearly all 
subjects issue from college libraries; and where the 
demand is ever increasingly keen for the man that 
knows. 

On the other hand, it is often with the college 



222 Stop Thief 

lad, as with the imprisoned felon, not so much what 
he takes on, as what of pernicious habit he casts off 
under schooling. The reference is to the parent- 
made sporting rounder and dead-beat whom college 
authorities should hold to the honor mark as to 
those things which adorn his person, for which he 
would "hang up" college-town merchants. When he 
can't be so held he should be shipped home with 
advice to his parents to start him again from that 
mark. So college atmosphere would be clarified, and 
parents impressed with the danger of paying out 
endless sporting slack to lads. 

Dr. Charles Alexander, President of Union Col- 
lege, Schenectady, N. Y., flails those who build and 
abet students of the extreme sporting stripe. The 
Doctor specifically denounces football run amuck, 
but his words are thusly charged with the broader 
condemnation : 

"The football situation in most colleges is dis- 
graceful. It is the worst abuse of the modern col- 
lege system. Fathers and mothers allow their sons 
to be exploited in the arena for profit like circus 
performers or vaudeville actors. Academies are 
scraped for athletic material, and inducements of 
all kinds are offered to promising athletes. The 
men who go into football are driven and coached 
under the professional system until they have no 
time for study. They have no time for anything 
but athletics/' 



TKe Sporting Instinct Run Mad 223 

Dr. Alexander's voice is neither singular nor stri- 
dent. Educators the land over know the problem as 
he knows it. Many have spoken as he spoke at Chi- 
cago. More have ducked the swing of the aforesaid 
"long arms.' 5 A few still press for sporting bulls 
to charge educational china shops. The last should 
fit the vocation to the idea: say as prize ring ref- 
erees, acting in which capacity they would not pros- 
titute a sacred calling for a cheap popularity. 

(2) It cheats students of time and taste for 
study ; and taste for study, like a palate for olives, 
is mostly acquired. The average lad will not know 
it until knowledge won shall have born in him a 
desire for more knowledge. A student won't cache 
much out of books that will assure him in man's 
best estate, while his affections are given over wholly 
to sport and to the vitiating by-products of sport. 
The same is true of book learning and bench prac- 
tice for imprisoned felons. 

(3) It grounds students in a grossly exaggerated 
idea of its importance in the earthly scheme, and 
of the actual worth of those who are wedded to it. 
The bulk of employers would rather know that a 
man had not essayed any form of competitive sport 
at college, than that he had been ridden by it there. 
Exceptions rest to a man with alumni employers 
whose comparative growth even the sporting "bug" 
could not stunt; and precious few of the latter are 
mentioned for contribution to human progress. 



224 Stop Thief 

No matter what direction it may take, after-col- 
lege sporting "pull" can't reimburse a sport-robbed 
student. It certainly won't be likely to add a jot 
to his intrinsic quality, or to his sustained efforts 
in pursuit of big things. Therefore it can be argued 
stiffly that mere cognizance of such a pull operates 
as a drag alike on the institution and the student. 

(4) It has haled to sporting lines multitudes of 
lads who ought not to have been allowed so much 
as a "try-out" at top speed or endurance ; and mul- 
titudes more to competition which jeopards the 
stoutest heart and kinetic system vouchsafed man. 

Authorities are nearly as one as to the damaging 
result that must obtain in all but schools in which 
athletes are most carefully selected, trained and 
supervised. That barely lets out the universities, 
plus an isolated college and preparatory school; 
high and grammar schools not at all. 

Were perfect selection possible, and perfect train- 
ing supervision universal, the length of the training 
season would still be impractical when not perni- 
cious, in that it would maximize the consequence of 
sport and minimize the weight of study in the minds 
of the students actively engaged, as well as in the 
minds of the mass affected by suggestion and in- 
direct participation. 

Dr. George I. Moylan asserts that he "has never 
known a case of athletic heart at Columbia Univer- 
sity which was caused by participation in college 



The Spatting Instinct Run Mad 225 

sport 55 ; but the Doctor's admission, "It is a very 
difficult matter to determine at just what point 
normal development ceases and abnormal develop- 
ment begins," leaves his assertion a bit short of 
ballast. 

Heart trouble a-plenty may be heart trouble of 
form other than that diagnosed as "athletic heart 55 ; 
it may also initiate in destructive athletic endeavor 
and for the time being defy detection. Again, the 
heart is not the only vital organ which is subject 
to over-stimulation and traumatism. Say nothing of 
the brain, lungs and kidneys, medical men are just 
getting a look-in at the ductless glands, to suspect 
that they mature with the heart at not less than 
the age of twenty, and that they should be favored 
rather than forced in young manhood. 

Dr. Moylan 5 s deduction, based on a study of col- 
lege oarsmen extending back some years, to the 
effect: "They live longer than lots of healthy men 
accepted by life insurance companies, 55 is neither 
inclusive nor conclusive. College watermen have been 
the physical cream of colleges. They should stand 
out in life insurance statistics by right of their natu- 
ral grip on long life, tightened by their athletic 
training in college. They do no such thing for the 
same reason horsemen fight shy of colts that have 
been heart-exhausted; especially of those that have 
been heart-exhausted and beaten in a race. Further- 
more, when colts are campaigned to extreme speed, 



226 Stop Thief 

it is nearly always done at the expense of their 
breeding quality. 

Some thirty-five years ago, the stewards of the 
Rochester, N. Y., Grand Circuit track hung up a 
$10,000 free-for-all purse for stallions. The writer 
saw eight of the best young bluebloods of the day 
compete in a gruelling contest that went to the last 
heat allowable. Every inch of every heat was fought 
bitterly from wire to wire. Every horse put his last 
fraction of speed and stamina into the race. The 
sequel: Not one of those splendid animals set for 
himself thereafter a mark significantly lower than 
the lowest mark set in that race. What is more 
important, not one of them is registered the sire 
of a blue-ribboned performer, and there were never 
speedier, gamer, or grander young stallions than 
those which scored for the word in that race. 
Tempted by the size of the purse, their owners killed 
off in one race what their horses should have carried 
on to gradually, and what they should have trans- 
mitted. 

Dr. Spaeth, coach of the Princeton navy, dis- 
agrees roundly with Dr. Moylan. Dr. Spaeth de- 
clares flatly: "No one can convince me that four 
miles of fast rowing does not affect the hearts of 
some men in the shell," 

Intercollegiate rowing was abolished at the Uni- 
versity of Wisconsin on the recommendation of its 



The Sporting Instmct Run Mad 22^7 

medical faculty, because examination by that fac- 
ulty of fifty-four typical cases of athleticitis dis- 
closed in every one more or less of attack on the 
heart, or on the cardiac arteries. Surely Wiscon- 
sin would not have disbanded her navy could medi- 
cal supervision have covered the dangers of long- 
distance rowing. 

Let doctors disagree and cleave to the keenest of 
watermen: Coaches Jim Rice of Columbia, Jim Ten 
Eyck of Syracuse, and Harry Vail of Wisconsin, all 
speak out of the mouth of "Old Man" Courtney of 
Cornell, who had this among other things to say to 
a body of college alumni at Syracuse a few months 
before he died: "The four-mile race is a heart- 
breaker in fact and in figures. Five months of train- 
ing is not enough to prevent college oarsmen from 
having hypertrophied hearts. I am convinced that 
training throughout the year would not eliminate 
the danger inevitable in a four-mile race." 

The Intercollegiate Rowing Association has re- 
duced the four-mile race tentatively by three-quar- 
ters of a mile. That is lame compromise. If a full 
year of training is not enough for a four-mile race, 
it is no more than enough for three-and-one-quarter 
miles; hence the question of impracticability is left 
just where it was. Viewed from any angle for any 
distance from two miles on, the problem is difficult 
and dangerous. At two miles, extreme speed would 



228 Stop TMef 

be maintained throughout, length of training for 
which should not be less than now obtains for four- 
mile contests. 

What is true of rowing is true of all college sport 
run to the crack of the professional whip with its 
commercial handle, and of lower school sport run 
indirectly to the same impetus. That fact is charge- 
able chiefly with the thirteen killed and three thou- 
sand seriously injured in something like 30,000 
games of football played during the year of 1914; 
and the figure for the "injured" covers only those 
reported. Greater thousands of hurts, had in regu- 
lar and irregular games, all of which were more or 
less serious, and many of which marked lads with 
traumatic wounds and for fateful trouble in after 
years, were not reported. 

That national honors were paid to the half-dozen 
marines killed and wounded at the landing at Vera 
Cruz in 1914 was as it should be. That the nation 
did not bat an eyelash over the thirteen killed and 
thousands seriously injured at football during the 
same year is no less incongruous because falsely 
condoned in the name of sport. 

(5) It does not graduate with the college gradu- 
ate who had been immersed in it at college. Still 
vibrating to its measures, he must needs take a post- 
graduate course at it; in professional ranks if his 
ambition does not reach above the sporting "star" 
and "easy money"; or, under like reason and less 



The Sportmg Instmct Run Mad 229 

inspiration, while prostituting hard-earned dollars 
dumped into his palm by a purblind father, who 
will tell you with some heat that he "had to grub 
for his and he doesn't purpose that Paddy shall." 
As Paddy would put it in vulgar parlance, "The 
pater should worry!" Paddy won't; not over grul>- 
bing, will Paddy, nor over anything else, save that 
the pater's run-of-mine shall not continue to pan 
out. 

There is direct as well as indirect analogy be- 
tween that fact and the nearly six-hundred fistic 
brutalities which were pulled off for the year of 
1915 in America by forty-odd first rate pugilists, 
who pulled down pyramids of those same fool-spent 
dollars in each, alleged, contest; fool-spent if for 
no other reason than that limited-round bouts are 
so commonly and palpably "faked" as to disgust 
out-and-out sports, themselves often overreached 
at the ringside. More than that, promoters of fights 
do not shy at mulcting their own breed, as witness : 

In an investigation conducted by State Comp- 
troller Eugene M. Travis he found that fight pro- 
moters were cheating the State and "double-cross- 
ing" their tools, the fighters, through juggling at- 
tendance figures and issuing a superabundance of 
press tickets. 

Passing to hundreds of lads dubbed second, third, 
and fourth "raters," who engage yearly in thousands 
of character-killing contests, we tap the fount of 



230 Stop Thief 

those blessings in the fact that those lads could 
not ply their pugilistic wares, did not high-brows 
sponsor low-brow sport. 

Speaking of present students and prospective 
patrons of pugism, Dr. David Starr Jordan does 
not cough at colloquial English in his assertion : 

"There are too many 'low-brows' only one degree 
removed from 'roughnecks' in college." There are, 
and there they peddle persistently their sporting 
stock-in-trade. What are directing agents going 
to do about pug-charged pace, every successive step 
of which crosses a lad's cradle gifts? What, when 
just one sporting fling leaves many a lad polluted, 
when not dispossessed of procreative power? 

(6) It operates to rob its dupes of sense of pro- 
portion. Therefore so many of them are all-round 
wastrels ; and therefore the most difficult first-offense 
felon to reform is usually the one in whose blood the 
greatest number of sporting "bugs" circulate. And 
hence a college, or prison, should specify somewhat 
more than sufficient of pure sport to cover the legiti- 
mate offices of pure sport ; but no more by any kind 
of compromise, else we shall soon have sport-ridden 
colleges and prisons in general, as we have now in 
specific instances. 

Sporting-mongers to the contrary, the approved 
prison regime of the future will require, even of life 
prisoners, that they shall pile knowledge, skill and 
wage. That, under all-sufficient of exercise in the 



The Sporting Instinct Run Mad 231 

open to keep them in physical trim ; voluntary exer- 
cise prescribed to brace the spirit and break the 
monotony, and compulsory exercise in order to as- 
sure the result. Life prisoners are included because 
the force of their opposed example will not be tol- 
erated. All of that will be because it will have to 
be in order to check the steadily-reinforced drive 
of criminals, to whom the modicum of present de- 
terrent measures is as is the rind to the heart of 
the fruit. If the Almighty can not hold humans to 
the lettering of His book short of deterring them, 
just why should man the mite imagine he can re- 
write and execute regardless of law divine? 

(7) It is destructive of clean sport and charac- 
ter in that it cleaves to the trickster and his tricks. 
An example in big-league baseball was the reading 
through an opening in the centre field fence of the 
battery signals of the opposition, and the flashing 
of them to the home batsman. Such practice is 
cousin-german to a certain crooked cunning which 
confirmed criminals employ. It is on a par with 
rowdy-baiting of umpires, interspersed with billings- 
gate heard plainly by ladies in the grand stand, 
and purposed to bias decisions in favor of rough- 
necks engaged at foul play. Methods of the kind 
are barely tolerable in war where they are subject 
to the last edict of the last law. On the athletic 
field they are beneath contempt when both sides can 
make equal use of them. Even then, they have not 



232 Stop Thief 

a thing to do with actual athletic superiority. They 
decide naught but crafty crookedness, and rowdy- 
ism, to which they tend to habituate. Needless to 
add, your baseball trickster is usually your heart- 
less hound, whose "spikes" are a menace to flesh and 
bone. 

(8) It contributes to conditions whereof the 
great bulk of Americans exercise not at all for the 
sake of exercise; and it fools a horde of them into 
the belief that the body's needs are met in the modi- 
cum of exercise they get while they gyrate and 
vocalize over the athletic prowess of others. 

To sit or stand for short periods part of each 
year and oxygenate while relaxing is relatively good ; 
but it is only to stave off slightly the final reckon- 
ing for those who otherwise chain themselves to 
sedentary pursuits. All might do so much, plus 
the like of automobile jaunts, and little retard 
national suicide the most stupid, as did physically 
frayed out peoples of the past; the most stupid, 
because the very joy of living resides in the normal 
metabolism of the body, and that cannot go on 
short of a sufficient amount of balanced exercise 
taken consecutively in free air. 

Notwithstanding the handsome advance of medi- 
cal and social science, the breaking down process 
edges the shroud closer and closer to the medial line 
in America. Vital statistics show that mortality 
due to the steadily declining resisting power from 



The Sportwig Instmct Rum Mad 233 

that line of the heart, arteries and kidneys has in- 
creased about one hundred per cent during the last 
three decades. 

It is an anomalous fact that the sporting craze 
usually disposes its lay patron to shrink from exer- 
cise. For example, he will ride to the ball park. 
Rather than miss the "practice," he yields a brisk 
walk of a few blocks, the which would do him more 
good than anything else on earth. Having ridden 
home, he will stuff already stuffed and flabby tissues 
with fuel and repair food, and thus overload the 
transmuting agents of his body, which dump into 
his blood the toxic matter they cannot handle. Be- 
times he will tell "Doc" he "doesn't know why he 
should be, but he is all run down." Betimes there- 
after he will hurl anathema at doctors because they 
do not wield magic wands of rejuvenation. 

True, a degenerating people nurse several inter- 
locking ills, each of which determines in the degree 
to which it runs to singular expression ; but national 
decline always posits capitally the overfed and 
under-exercised who watch out nearly every dying 
midnight of their adult lives. 

Resume : 

Sport commercialized and overdone gluts pleas- 
ure, inflates superficial values, filches from fair 
play, cripples fundamental industry, circulates dis- 
appearing dollars, induces then confirms sin, cheats 
then afflicts virtue, turns strength to weakness, weak- 



234 Stop Thief 

ness to crime, maims and kills: and doing each it 
shunts human potential out of its heritage. Hence 
it was largely responsible for the passing of pre- 
mier civilizations. 

Remedial suggestions: 

Sport is a great big thing which takes fast hold 
of a lad; it has to do vitally with the length and 
usefulness of his days. Obviously, therefore, the 
items which follow but broach a basic idea. The 
idea is to rationalize amateur sport. Take college 
sport as an example and apply the paragraphs in 
agreement with particular conditions, and the ages 
of participants : 

(1) Place physical culture and competitive sport 
under the supervision of a physical director who 
shall be a graduate of the college he serves, who 
shall select his departmental chiefs from the student 
body, and who shall be named with the college 
faculty. 

(2) Give the physical director time in which to 
get his bearings, and his staff full opportunity to 
perfect themselves in the theory and practice of 
their respective departments. Then cut out the pro- 
fessional coach. 

(3) Reduce water and land competition to com- 
paratively short dashes; on water, say, to one-and- 
three-quarter miles for senior crews and one-and- 
one-half miles for all other crews. On land, eight- 
hundred-and-eighty yards is as far as a lad should 



The Sporting Instmct Run Mad 235 

be allowed to compete nearly extended at sustained 
speed. 

(4) Limit the land endurance test to the mile run, 
with all but sound, natural, and stout-hearted run- 
ners barred. Cross-country running taxes the last 
tissue. It serves no human demand. The mile run 
meets more of stretch running than a man will be 
called upon to do, while it carries much the lesser 
menace to the vital organism. This, with the pre- 
ceding paragraph, would curtail the training table. 

(5) Make body-building calisthenics for all a 
part and an important part of the institutional 
regime; make them exact, spirited, and conclusive 
under self-made student masters of them who have 
the gift to enlist the highest voluntary cooperation 
of the mass. 

(6) Have an up-to-date gymnasium open to all, 
but yield the apparatus thereof to those for whom 
the doctor prescribes it. 

(7) Encourage cross-country walking and hill 
climbing, with short stretches of running on the level 
in posture which correctly taught setting-up drill 
will cause a lad to take on habitually, if not wholly 
unconsciously. Ere long, the frame will be set and 
the lad will feel uncomfortable unless he stands, 
walks and runs as Nature planned he should. 

(8) Hold a lad's set-up, ability to take care of 
himself, general physical well-being, and knowledge 
of the use and misuse of his body second to no other 



236 Stop Thief 

part of his college training in the winning of his 
diploma. Think of the individual and national rea- 
sons why that should be. 

(9) No matter how high up or how low down, 
that teacher will get the best objective results who 
enters into the spirit of sport with his pupils. Shall 
he take a hand to comparative skill, so much the 
better for all concerned. 

(10) Sport will ride lads to a degree and should 
in order to be most serviceable. It remains for school 
authorities to see to it that the degree does not 
trench upon study, nor upon the spirit in which a 
lad should be led to put on that wonderful thing 
we call, — knowledge. 

(11) Discourage long-distance jaunts to con- 
tests. They disturb the morale of the student body, 
break the continuity of the legitimate education and 
training of those actively involved, and over- 
emphasize the importance of competitive sport in 
the minds of all. 

(12) Stamp out commercialism; particularly, 
stop all of bargaining for and "inducements" to 
promising athletes from lower schools. 

(13) Penalize the instinctive bruiser so that he 
will stay penalized. 

(14) Let the physical director and his student 
lieutenants constitute the institutional Board of 
Governors of Physical Culture. The Board to hold 
conference on call of the physical director, himself 



The Sporting Instinct Run Mad 237 

presiding while aiming to bring out the best in each 
for sequential and balanced progress. 

(15) Hold to the physical director loyally, while 
holding him for results. 

Such radical changes would be difficult during the 
initial year of transition. Standard records would 
no doubt stand, most of them, for something like 
two years. But once the system got its second wind, 
landmarks should be in as much danger as now, 
middle-distance aquatic marks at least threatened. 
In any event, building to manhood and to a service- 
able body is bigger than records. 

Any other view is unthinkable than that the prime 
lads of the land would do what they would have to 
do when put to it; do as much in good time for 
themselves as did newsboys who began with the crud- 
est of tools and without a suspicion of education. 

Such a system, compulsory in part, selective in 
reason, would vitalize local spirit and performance; 
shift honors and hold them close to "easy" as be- 
tween colleges of like grade; stop exploitation of 
the young for athletic purposes; establish a most 
important faculty chair to which lads could look 
up, and motive them to put off that which does not, 
and put on that which should, distinguish a college- 
trained gentleman, scholar, and athlete. 

As to universal athletics, your typical American 
knows he pays as he goes with pampered palate and 
body's ease. Were his ears an hundred they had 



238 Stop Thief 

been stuffed with physical facts such as that brisk 
daily walks of a total of four miles are a blessing, 
and that to gorge with ill-selected food which the 
mechanism of the body is given not half a chance 
to transmute, is slow suicide over the gaseous route; 
yet will he not so much as walk with you, neither 
will he abide the dietist. The one-sided exercise of 
the most of him is done indoors in an atmosphere 
where a match flames as if in protest. More often 
it consists in paying out and pulling in playing 
cards in the same kind of an atmosphere. 

Reliance for amendment and repair of set, can- 
tankerous ways and means, is on up-coming kiddies. 
And so, let Americans assure the rational all-round 
physical schooling of their sprouting men and 
women. 

Firstly, increase vastly schoolground areas, then 
specify again as much time for natural and artificial 
exercise thereon. Thoroughly wash the air of the 
school buildings while the children are at play. 
Teachers all will feel better and do better work for 
having been turned out with their charges. 

Secondly, give the first morning play period to 
setting-up exercise; not to a flabby counterfeit so 
commonly called by agents who know not the "A" 
of physical culture, but taught by masters of mo- 
tion who, knowing their human physiology, know 
how to handle the individual case. 

Thirdly, vote and pay for such training and play, 



The Sporting Instmct Rvm Mad 239 

along with universal military training, under the 
knowledge that it will build and shape the bodies 
and minds of your loved ones to their best and long- 
est use for purposes either of peace or war. And 
don't fail to run over, when you can, and watch 
the fun. Your presence will inspire the youngsters 
to excel, arm you with first-hand information, the 
change of scene and thought will do you good, and 
such as the setting-up drill will be done but indif- 
ferently if it does not prove catching. 

Finally, put the stamp of condemnation on the 
parasital "promoter" of the parasital thug and his 
assault. 

No one fact out of human history is more anom- 
alous than that Americans are to-day led by the 
ears by those "who toil not" and will not toil, so 
long as they can flimflam their kind into belief in 
the instinctive brute and instinctive brutalities. 

Hitched to correctional endeavor, pugism amounts 
at once to scandalous reversion to primitive type, 
and an offense against humanism. 



CHAPTER VH 

TEMPTING AND TAGGING TO 
CRIMINALITY 

"We aren't against the forces of reform, but 

we are rather bored with the farces of reform." 

— Columbia (S. C.) Record, 

Writer and reader frequently end at loggerheads 
because they had not reasoned from the same plane 
of thought. The one will have searched from the top 
down, the other from the bottom up. Common 
ground of understanding can not be reached by 
those who clash in reverse order of thinking. Let 
us, therefore, define what we mean by a criminal, 
before we risk declaration of the causes, prevention, 
and cure of him: 

Criminal law holds one to be a criminal who is 
convicted of any crime written into that law. Such 
an one is subject to the restrictions and impositions 
which may be visited upon felonious offenders under 
the legal wording. Yet we should work untold injus- 
tice did we apply the criminal code inelastically to 
unfolding lads, thousands of whom are intrinsically 
stanch, even while they are impelled to anti-social 
expression. 

240 



Tempting and Tagging to Criminality 241 

Circumstances of birth, bringing up and environ- 
ment may urge a lad to stub his legal toe badly, 
yet leave him scot-free of motive such as moves the 
instinctive, habitual, predatory felon. At any rate, 
it is with him we have to do, and it is because of 
exactions placed upon him by a rightly-ordered so- 
ciety that we must needs undo much done ostensibly 
for him, during the past three decades, by the single- 
seeing. 

Having differentiated the by-choice criminal and 
such as the circumstantial offender, responsibility 
for whom so often rests primarily with public law 
falsely framed or flabbily executed, we should be able 
to stamp very close to intrinsic values. 

The average young felon is a criminal only in the 
sense that he committed crime by the book. More- 
over, his crime is frequently of a vicarious nature 
from motive nearly unselfish, as was that of the 
young dry goods clerk who robbed his employers 
of silks and satins with which to adorn the kind of 
a woman whose heart is set on baubles. The fact 
that the spurious wife knew she preened tainted 
feathers, did not let the young man out. He was 
indefensible in the final analysis; but not at all as 
is the human drone who packs his purse, pets his 
palate, and pursues his passions with pilfered coin. 

Contrariwise, we needs must train long-distance 
glasses, instead of relying on the myopic vision of 
the auto-intoxicated who exploit the basic fallacy 



242 Stop Thief 

that not one in a hundred of actual criminals is 
criminal because he wants to be criminal; and that 
the one would disappear, did all in the work of re- 
form radiate the benign influence they, the blown- 
in-the-bottle reformers, radiate. 

Being at once single-seeing and self-obsessed, a 
rounding off of the vowels in support of the "per- 
sonal equation" is meat and drink to our cocksure 
friends; albeit they refuse the cardinal fact that 
that equation works both ways; that it is a pre- 
carious throw of the master criminologist bent on 
merciful measures; and that criminological sins 
galore are attributable to tyros who misapply the 
method, while misunderstanding the man and so- 
ciety's exactions upon him. 

If it sinks in, at last, that reformation of the 
submerged and always prime fraction of criminals 
is a many-sided problem in which the personal equa- 
tion can play but a minor part in the grand aver- 
age, your criminological dilettante is up stump. He 
has staked his case on the turn of the personal ace. 
That card has faced against him; and since he has 
taken no pains to arrive at knowledge of the singu- 
lar, as well as sequential values of the actual king 
cards of the reform deck, he needs must cast about 
for some bizarre scheme which will at once cover 
his retreat and clinch his academic hold on public 
opinion. 

Hence the play has been again and again to the 



T&mptmg and Tagging to Criminality 243 

personal and to please, with exactly those institu- 
tional activities featured which are least calculated 
to conserve reformation, and all culminating in the 
last mal-assortment and mal-direction of prison 
methods, engineered by inmates. 

The first step in promulgation was to "pass up 
the buck" as concerns the submerged fraction who 
don't want to reform, and play up to the public 
through those who do; and that is fundamentally 
false, because in that fraction consists always the 
nucleus of crime. What is more informing, final 
steps were taken under the equally false conclusion 
that if "It takes a thief to catch a thief," it takes 
a thief to reform a thief. Firstly, the conclusion 
won't wash, just because habitual thieves don't and 
won't "catch" habitual thieves, — not as a rule they 
do not and will not. Secondly, those States that 
have used criminals for the purpose given, have been 
guilty of reactive error, as the record shows. 

Inclusive of isolated and most heinous instances 
of hidden crime, a State which forms copartner- 
ship with criminals for the detection of crime, de^ 
means itself and weakens its authority, while bidding 
for social chaos. 

At best, the criminal sleuth will seldom do more 
than ease the going for paid agents of the law 
whose business it is to outguess, outflank, and out- 
reach the criminal, be he ever so astute. At the 
worst, through "double-crossing" those of his kind, 



244 Stop Thief 

the felon ferret will establish murderous chains of 
individual and gang reprisal, compared with which 
anything he will usually "give up" sinks to insig- 
nificance. 

Again, since he whom the criminal dubs "stool- 
pigeon" is usually the meanest and slyest of preda- 
tory foxes, for him to forage from both sides of 
the street is just to express his nature; and a leg 
of the law "double-crossed" by a double-dyed, crime- 
tainted reynard in human form, is neither predicated 
in the penal code, nor subject for social gratulation. 

Withal, visible signs warn that the worst is yet 
to come. Those signs indicate that the "moral sua- 
sion" cult rather court being knocked about on the 
penological sea with its insistent undertow; and 
since for that cult to tack were to yield at once of 
prestige, perquisites, and the public ear; above all, 
since our friends will of necessity seek safe harbor 
within the scope of their penological vision, we may 
reasonably anticipate a plethora piled upon pleth- 
ora of the like of baseball by day and bone-rat- 
tling by night, so timed and prosecuted as to break 
up continuity of mental and physical endeavor, as 
well as coordination of the two, under a rational 
reformative regime. 

All of rightly-ordered sport and amusement can 
and should be made auxiliary to every known 
means of reform. To deny a prisoner sufficient of 
free exercise in the open, and variety of mental activ- 



Tempting and Tagging to Criminality 245 

ity within enclosure, is to defeat the fundamental 
purpose for which he is confined. Man can be made 
neither muscularly nor mentally automatic, and 
thrive. On the other hand, the moment the tone of 
quasi-reformative activities is lowered, and the em- 
phasis is shifted to them from averages which alone 
bespeak the readiness of a prisoner to meet the 
exactions of a workaday world, that moment they 
become non-reformative. Hence, we shall wisely 
question as to whether or no a paroled prisoner had 
won trade and scholastic degrees, and count it com- 
paratively inconsequential in case he had contrib- 
uted to the sporting traditions of the place. This, 
essentially, because the first false flings of thousands 
of right-decent lads initiate with theii* introduction 
to habitual low-down "sports," and through them 
to crooks and crookedness. 

So long as the drive is to placate prisoners under 
an elective-selective curriculum which yields at all 
points to anti-social sporting instincts, so long will 
continental America cling to the record for crim- 
inal recidivists. So long, too, will the crimes of re- 
peaters bear to extremes, such, for example, as those 
lightly essayed by the daylight thug who parts fin- 
gers with purse strings, or shoots to kill the instant 
his identity is in jeopardy; nay, even kills wantonly, 
as if for the mere lust of killing. 

Palpably, all but a modicum of repression goes 
out of a prison sentence which sends a many-times 



246 Stop Thief 

convicted felon flippantly as to a picnic to a prison 
whose measures of reform he is suffered practically 
to dictate; for, if given his head, he will mostly 
vegetate and fake, while employing every subterra- 
nean means at his kind-of-cunning command to 
establish a promiscuous criminal camaraderie. And 
woe unto freeman or prisoner who temerariously 
interposes himself between such criminals and the 
fruition of their prison plans. If the former, he 
will be pronounced "no good" and "framed" to that 
measure either directly or indirectly. If the latter, 
his prison days will be made as miserable as the 
"gang" can make them, and he not improbably 
marked for "treatment" on the outside. 

Under such prison procedure it could not have 
been otherwise than that the preventive and repres- 
sive arms of the State should alike suffer compara- 
tive paralysis as concerns the class of criminals in 
question. The bid has been so direct, open, and per- 
sistent for prison expression of the last base thing 
which appeals to criminal instinct, that the wonder 
is very many more of habituals have not issued from 
the great mass of offenders; and they would, had 
not recent war conditions, combined with labor agi- 
tation immediately preceding, boosted the wage of 
the mere machine tender to the level of that of the 
journeyman mechanic of past years. Again, many 
of potential habituals took to the service abroad. 

But such conditions lasted only so long as the 



Tempting and Tagging to Criminality 247 

war lasted. The moment the peace of the world was 
assured, prices began inevitably to seek the level 
demanded by sane policies ; and then, the delayed 
deluge of crime, of course. There was, and there 
will be, no "wave" about it. 

In so far as the American people have dug down 
into their pockets to finance freak measures of re- 
form, they have been properly served, since it should 
leach into the mind of a lumberjack that the harle- 
quin stunts of the hay loft are out of processes of 
intellection but a step removed from those which 
motivate the making of mud pies. While both of 
those activities mark successive stages in the unfold- 
ing of the minds respectively of the child and youth, 
they bear just about as much relation to reforma- 
tion of character of the adult criminal, as does the 
moon to monkey-business. By the same token, any 
alleged reformative regime that lends emphasis to 
such activities is false in determining base and must 
disappoint, — albeit the actual criminal naturally ac- 
claims men and measures which permit him to fool 
most everybody most of the time, while declining 
pursuit of approved knowledge and skill. 

Otherwise admirable gentlemen, who have made 
way for the merry-go-round idea of prison reform, 
are not to be shriven of responsibility thereof be- 
cause they have been purblind. Upon him who as- 
sumes the role of seer of reform and in that role 
to trace the footprints of the Saviour, rests the bur- 



248 Stop Thief 

den to arrange the prime factors of reformation in 
the order of their relative value; his is the duty 
also to distinguish as between prime and incidental 
factors, else he shall get tangled in a web of his 
own weaving, and be caught at robbing the one 
class of law-breakers in order to misfit the other. 
Doing that, he has lent hand at building to flippant, 
spineless frauds, surcharged with mal-suggestion. 

Gentlemen cheat themselves, cheat the public 
purse, cheat the public safety, and cheat unfortu- 
nate falling men, when they impose upon a most 
grave while Herculean task, prison measures that 
are trivial when they are not actually non-reforma- 
tive. 

For one thing, it is pat to remind that passing 
unearned largess to any part of the body politic 
runs parallel in result to that which charlatanic 
tribunes of Rome initiated through tossing un- 
earned donatives to the Roman rabble. Civic virtue 
was not to be purchased then, and it is not now, 
either in or out of prison. Then, there was, and 
now there is, no arm-around-the-neck, happy-go- 
lucky, let-her-drift short cut to social rehabilitation 
for those anti-socially driven, or swayed. 

Character is to be reformed only over the long 
route nearly as it is formed, save that in the former 
instance the added handicap issues which requires 
of us to induce a lad to put off the old and bad, 
while he takes on the new and good. And that's 



Tempimg and Tagging to Criminality 249 

the job of a full-sized man and criminologist; a 
full-sized man in the sense that his intrinsic sym- 
pathies are keen enough to cut through surface in- 
dications to the bone of a given case; and a full- 
sized criminologist in the sense that his natural 
capacity thereof is so great, and his preparation so 
broad and deep, as to enable him to separate reform- 
ative wheat and chaff. Even at that, one must 
needs take frequent account of one's self, and of the 
trend of human endeavor, and change one's plans of 
approach and attack in agreement with the call of 
ever changing conditions which make for the crim- 
inal. 

One shall have in mind also that it was required 
of the Spartan youth to be a resourceful sneak- 
thief; that the robber-baron took on the "holdup" 
game soon thereafter and excused himself neither 
to his king nor to his countrymen; and that not 
so long ago, timed as evolution ticks off time, the 
great preponderance of human effort was given over 
to predatory conquest under none other than natu- 
ral selection. "Cease, therefore," said Brunnus, 
king of the Gauls, to ambassadors three of the 
Fabii of Rome, "to pity the Clusinians whom we 
besiege, lest ye teach us to be kind and compassion- 
ate to those that are oppressed by you." 

We know that traits of character persist and 
govern unto the sixth generation. We do not know 



250 Stop Thief 

how far hereditary taint strikes through and tends 
to govern. Up to date, our grasp on hereditary 
transmission is so insecure as to make it purely 
gratuitous for one to allege of the "law" thereof. 
Hence, we can by no means be sure that certain 
of instinctive thieves of the present are not meas- 
urably the natural blood brothers of juveniles whom 
Lycurgus sped on their way to pilfer promiscu- 
ously, and to be brutally punished if the success of 
their undertakings did not measure up to the then 
standard. Instinct lashed into lads unto death 356- 
323 B. C. would necessarily carry with a tremen- 
dous pertinacity; probably not to this year of our 
Lord, but possibly so. 

And hence, our primary feeling toward a thief 
should be that of pity, just as we deem it pity 
that so many of an originally ingenuous, pastoral 
people like the Sicilian should have been metamor- 
phosed into dagger-thrusting brigands by predatory 
peoples over sea who wrested possession from the 
rightful owners of their isle of isles and "granary 
of the Mediterranean." 

But blow the wind of circumstance as it may, it 
is up to mankind to temper to it the last human 
heart chilled by it. How, then, shall we set sail so 
as best to conserve the social regeneration of the 
instinctive, habitual, predatory thief? That's the 
pith of the crime problem and it must be met. What 



Tempting and Tagging to Criminality 251 

the variety of him doesn't so much matter; just take 
him as he is stamped, and wants to be without 
apology. 

If sympathy were all the average of even first- 
offending lads needed, the question of reform would 
reduce to very simple numbers; if so, then feed, 
clothe and house law-breakers rationally, and turn 
them into the sunlight for plenty of exercise under 
the supervision of men gifted singularly to lead and 
lave. In very truth, an atmosphere of the kind would 
be hands in effectiveness above the prison in which 
petty parceling of measures with time inductive to 
waste of human potential for acquirement of men- 
tal and manual skill stands out only less markedly 
than does the deplorable moral tonus of the place. 

Of course it is needful to encourage prisoners all 
of the way up through the gamut of their prison 
endeavor. It is needful, as well, that we know our 
reform score, and where its sympathetic passages 
should be marked "pianissimo." And it is needful 
that we dig beneath the surface for the fact that 
by just so much as the score is marked to the 
maudlin, it is shaded out of harmony with those 
purposes ; also, that he who insists upon such shad- 
ing has lost his grip on essential reform values, — 
if he ever had fast hold on them. 

Prisoners who are bent on pulling up resent effu- 
sive patronage, and in their hearts despise those 
who effect it. Prisoners who are bent on pulling down 



252 Stop Thief 

make all of misuse possible of a false weapon and 
of him who wields it. Therefore recent tales of 
prison mismanagement many times multiplied, some 
merciless to murder, others ridiculous beyond the 
measure of mirth, and all indicative of the mess 
man makes of it when he essays to reverse both God 
and Nature. 

"Proof of the (reform) pudding" is indeed "in 
the eating." Let an instinctively criminal lad get 
his institutional start in a juvenile school of which 
it is prated that repression therein is scarcely known, 
and his chances to toboggan on to a prison of last 
resort are excellent. Let prisoners of that same 
prison wax enthusiastic over life in it, and its use- 
fulness is at once suspect; for, in every house of 
correction there is always an appreciable percent- 
age of inmates who must be force-fed to a certain 
extent of reform broth. That may be brutal truth 
hard to tell; but it is truth, just the same; truth 
forced into the consciousness of every worker in the 
work whose endeavors shall outlast the print of his 
own day. 

Betimes, the feeding will prove as abortive of re- 
form result as did preceding moral suasion minis- 
tered in long-suffering to the limit of safety; never- 
theless, to decline an issue created out of whole 
cloth by a sentient subject who will have no other 
issue is to refuse protection to the mass from the 



Tempting and Tagging to CrvmmaHty 253 

machinations of the few. Still, contact of extremes 
should be shunted when judiciously possible. Refor- 
mation can peg along nicely minus the judgments 
alike of the immovable Martinet and the muddle- 
pated milksop who couldn't think in manly meas- 
ures, give him a decade to do it. The steel of the 
one will strangle hope. The mush of the other will 
maim chance and breed license. 

While prevention is the primary principle both of 
divine and penal law, neither would serve man either 
at his best or worst, did it not carry the final alter- 
native. 

Dare to do it! Dare to parcel My laws to per- 
sonal ends, and pay, says Almighty God. Pick and 
choose along the forbidden path if you will, but, — 
pay! echoes Nature. 

Profess what he will, let the average man search 
his heart and say if it be not mostly fear of the 
wrath of God that binds him to the better thingsi 
of earth. 

Just because it bears the infinite essence as no 
other finite influence can, save perhaps the light of 
love, the law of consequence is the biggest thing in 
the basket of empirical knowledge. Then why be 
at such pains to delete from prison plans so close 
to all of that which would point prisoners to sub- 
jective and objective consideration of that law? 
Why pussyfoot to and from the decrees of God and 



254 Stop Thief 

the exactions of Nature, which will not down, strew 
favors while steaming to sentimental fervor as we 
may? 

If a lad is one of many of his grade commonly 
misnamed "incorrigible," who is ignorant, unskilled, 
and homosexually-driven while scornful of personal 
influence, law and authority, will he put on or cast 
off, confined wherein there is "no work, plenty of 
eats, and a bum argument every minute"? Crim- 
inals of the kidney quoted are constitutional ljars, 
first of all. Reduced to the level of truth, this one's 
words tell that prisoners of his ilk prevail positively 
for compromise whereby they shall not be pressed 
to exertion, nor proscribed by discipline, inimical 
to conditions which distinguish the low-down lodg- 
ing house. Moreover, the informer might have added 
tobacco without stint, and any drug for a price, 
paid by shining lights of the boiled-shirt brigade. 

The cardinal menace consists in play to the cards 
of criminals who combine as one to force the State 
to give as they would receive. The menace takes 
on the increasing weight of numbers, inclusive of 
legions of slipping lads who are swept along with 
the criminal tide. The weight of numbers is applied 
in two, main ways: (1) By mass manifestations cun- 
ningly designed and executed with regard to time 
and place, to make it most difficult to sort out the 
ring leaders other than through enforcement of 
natural preventive measures of counter scope, from 



Tempting and Tagging to Criminality 255 

which the all-knowing shrink. Notwithstanding, the 
acme of humane prison discipline resides in ability 
to direct the spirit of the mass against the indi- 
vidual bandit. (2) By the cleverly-conceived subter- 
fuge to deluge him with praise who obligingly sub- 
stitutes shadow for substance. That is to convince 
him of his heaven-born gift to solve the crime prob- 
lem. 

So it comes about that the burnt-in-the-baking 
penologist and the baked-to-a-turn criminal get 
along swimmingly. Having payed out prison slack 
until the word prison is nearly synonymous with 
play house where he prescribes, the former holds to 
it militantly that he had done a good job. The 
latter is certain of it; so certain that he admits it 
steadfastly, — the which fact is all-sufficient reason 
for a winnowing of current prison methods. 

Where those conditions approximate as given, the 
criminal is to blame only up to the measure of his 
understanding, befuddled as never before because 
his mentors utter counterfeit coin. He marvels how 
they will match reform pennies with him "heads he 
wins, tails they lose," yet minds all too clearly the 
chance afforded thereby to mask the real man and 
malinger to a minimum parole. That, very close to 
a man, he does, wretchedly equipped for a crime-free 
life. Back he goes, therefore, to the criminal groove 
whence he came and whence he was prison-pointed. 
Shall it have eventuated in the reverse, you shall 



256 Stop Thief 

have changed his habit of thought and action; and 
that you shall have done only through leading him 
to like reform doses which he will at first find "nasty 
to take and sure to disagree." E'en should he strenu- 
ously assert over-night transition of his character 
and aims, still search his averages for attest, ere you 
turn him back onto society. 

The ultimate loss in body, brain and spirit ac- 
crues to the criminal. The joke falls mainly on 
nobly-driven knights who blare their way to the 
reform lists bearing serviceable weapons whose points 
they know not how to direct. The financial toll is 
rightly taken of freemen supinely at ease with them- 
selves while lawlessness eats to the bone of the brand 
of freedom bequeathed them by the forefathers. The 
cure must carry sufficient of coercion to bridle, 
license; it must, else terroristic force is to be the 
established tool to hand of the lawless, — as witness 
world-wide anarchistic class movements, insistent 
and set off by sign visible in such as this excerpt 
clipped from the New York Times not so long ago : 

"Five hundred rifles were distributed to Chicago 
patrolmen to-day and a score of automobile squads 
were organized to hunt down gangs of gunmen and 
armed robbers who have been terrorizing the city 
for the last few weeks. 

"Contending that present police methods were 
powerless to handle the wave of crime, which has 
resulted in many murders, scores of payroll rob- 



Tempting and Tagging to CrvmmaUty 257 

beries, and hundreds of holdups, civic societies and 
city officials have united in a plea to Governor Low- 
den to suspend the parole of known criminals from 
penal institutions. It is asserted that these prison- 
ers, when released, return to Chicago and have been 
the motive force behind the present unparalleled 
reign of lawlessness." 

The above case is but one of many in point which 
bespeaks the inevitable reaction from regulating the 
prison days of the criminal so as to make those days 
no more onerous to him than is "sleeping time," — 
which he flippantly dubs them. 

Whencesoever relief shall come, it shall not ini- 
tiate in exchange of diatribe with accent on the per- 
sonal; neither in inflation of the Constitutional 
rights of one class of men, amounting to conscrip- 
tion of the same rights of all other classes of men; 
nor through sticking super-scientific stamps of men- 
tal stigma to lads whose alertness of mind had been 
trained on objects and objectives at war with the 
objects and objectives of mental tests held in sur- 
roundings at once strange and confusing; albeit 
such tests are accepted as final and stamps stuck 
without regard for the natural bent and scope of 
the subject's mental processes up to the moment of 
test; nor without regard for the further, vital fact, 
that the emulative spirit unfolds in lads with a dif- 
ference in degree of intensity along specific lines. 
If all strawberries fruited with the Early Ozark, 



258 Stop Thief 

man's palate would yield the more luscious late-sea- 
son varieties. If mere prococity were the human 
high sign, human hearts had been denied the mellow 
ripening of Mark Twain, along with the twofold 
unfolding of the spirit of Grant at the Wilderness 
and Mt. McGregor. 

The last paragraph is stressed in so much of 
effort given over to find out what the subject doesn't 
know, without probing to the last why of it; and 
to so little in search for what he does know, and 
for the last why of that ; so much and so little, seem- 
ingly unmindful of the governing truth that humans 
would reduce to a dead-flat level in a dead-flat world, 
did not Nature specialize to the clicking of her own 
clock. Force-feeding of the mind with pabulum anti- 
thetic to the natural mental bent may prove not 
one whit happier than force-feeding of the stomach 
with food which offends that organ. 

Any test for mental response which does not alike 
disclose the reasons for aptitudes and inaptitudes is 
essentially meaningless; it further falls to the 
ground if it fails to point coordination of aptitudes. 
To mark a budding lad a "moron" is of positive 
value only when it discloses dullness to the brink 
of deviation in the face of opportunity. Further- 
more, full adolescence, with which so frequently 
comes the awakening, is not infrequently retarded 
until near to the twentieth year for males. 

Hence, no man has call to lightly tag maturing 



Tempting and Tagging to Criminality 259 

lads in manner to make them the butts of their 
comrades. Than that, a better means could not 
be devised by which to engender auto-suggestion 
inimical to normal growth, the which so often and 
for so long lies dormant in the lap of Nature. Give 
the prisoner a bad name which arouses his resent- 
ment, while it cold-blankets aspiration and emula- 
tion, and he is made of sterner than average stuff 
if he does not earn it. Beyond question, the marked 
tendency of such false suggestion is to establish a 
lad in a life of crime. More than that, counter 
compensations are necessarily wasted on one whose 
mind had been ruthlessly ordered to refuse them. 

Over-zealous devotees of the "test" game seem 
to be oblivious of the fact that many of their basic 
conclusions leave something like fifty per cent of 
their countrymen strapped to mental inferiority. 
The bulk of those who are forced, mainly through 
unfortuitous circumstance, close to earth and to so- 
called vulgar toil would be excluded from the com- 
pany of the elect; and millions of the matured who 
are graded higher and still higher in the labor scale 
would find it most difficult just to fit little blocks, 
and to fetch and carry on the snap command of 
investigators whose mental energy had been given 
over more or less to fitting little blocks, and fetch- 
ing and carrying. Also, let the dock rat "test" 
the investigator along the lines of dock parlance 
and ensemble, and the investigator would measure 



260 Stop Thief 

to the moron. And also, who had done the ground- 
hog work of human progress, had the Almighty built 
solely to a race of intellectuals? 

When psycho-physical analysis of the prisoner is 
made primarily in order to establish his natural 
aptitudes, and secondarily for the purpose of fit- 
ting him into the reformative groove which agrees 
best with those aptitudes, such analysis will be 
worth all of money a State can be brought to ex- 
pend for it. Anything less runs to fiddling of conse- 
quence less than the circulation of the prisoner's 
blood in comparative purity. 

Results issuing under the comprehensive proce- 
dure indicated will prove the average felon to be a 
moron only in the restricted sense that millions of 
crime-free bread-winners are morons; which is to 
say: One can express but indifferently that which 
has engaged one's consciousness but indifferently. 
Therefore it gets us only as far as with the gutter- 
snipe thief in his own domain to demonstrate that 
his processes of intellection are next to nil, save as 
to the only mental field in which he had had a ghost 
of a chance to give any kind of ideas voluntary play. 

It is merest commonplace without force to declare 
intellection inseparable with conditions, each singu- 
lar one of which impelled to both grade and scope 
of the intellection declared. Compound personal 
analysis should run to the measure of its worth. It 
should not be so loosely ordered as to but further 



Tempting and Tagging to Criminality 261 

retard the most vital of worth-proven measures of 
reform, stuck at inches below the bar they should 
have cleared, decades ago. Take an example: Not 
all of the sins of omission and commission piled upon 
workers in the work by the self-assessed elite of 
reform are comparable in far-reaching effect with 
the holdup alone of the hand-tool processes in pris- 
ons. The writer knows whereof he writes when he 
writes that the industrial products of the juvenile 
reformatory in which he served back in 1887 were 
distinctly superior in outline and finish to like prod- 
ucts of the bulk of correctional institutions for 
advanced felons of to-day. 

For that, thanks, in the main, to the extreme radi- 
cal reformer's conception of what constitutes a vital 
agency of reform, and how and when it should oper- 
ate, and why ; and, in the concrete, to his pet predi- 
lection for puttering to the sore hurt of the cor- 
porate body of reform. 

An instance of the one is discipline adjusted to 
the early parole of prisoners, instead of to their 
pressing reformative needs; and by "discipline" we 
mean every conceivable influence calculated to lead 
prisoners to think, act, and work aright. An in- 
stance of the other is arbitrary reversal of local 
authorities on the mere word of recalcitrants, who 
lie if the institutional records of their conduct and 
work do not. That is to rattle two, non-reformative 
chains, the ultimate effect of which is to maim all 



262 Stop Thief 

of work and authority, make written records mean- 
ingless, and disgust hundreds of lads who are too 
manly to give the retort final to those who had sub- 
jected them to none but just impositions and depri- 
vations. 

Also, such cross-matched expression clears the 
way out for exactly those who should be held in, and 
holds in exactly those for whom the way out should 
be cleared. That procedure of the kind is pursued 
in good faith, in no wise alters the fact that if you 
can marvelously demarcate equity and favoritism 
while pursuing such procedure, you still can not 
present prisoners with reformation. 

Laymen have had no ready-to-hand means of 
knowing that surface strictures aimed at sterling 
criminologists were parallax with the meat of the 
matter. It is true, for instance, as charged, that 
some have deplored the spirit of the barbecue within 
prison walls. It is exactly the reverse of true that 
they have thereby retarded reformative processes. 

Likewise, it is true that those who see reforma- 
tion whole have parted under protest with old tools 
of proven worth. It is not true, as charged, that 
the admitted fact convicts them of ill-directed en- 
deavor; nor is it true, as plainly implied when not 
charged, that they have opposed captious front to 
other than palpably false use of reform tools, either 
old or new. For example, they have held against 
maximizing the importance of non-reformative sport, 



Tempting and Tagging to Criminality 263 

because so to emphasize is to feed an offending mem- 
ber and to create a mass psychology which mini- 
mizes the call for consecutive education and train- 
ing along fundamental lines. 

Admittedly, we can keep a given prisoner good- 
natured through capitalizing the sporting field in 
his mind; but had he, when free, habitually divided 
his waking hours between picking pockets, the ponies, 
baseball, and the like of "the bones 5 ' while not for- 
getting the brothel, — would or would not such policy 
furnish him further formulae for his depraved in- 
stincts ? 

Specifically considered, free America must take 
up dropped stitches, then safeguard the person and 
property of the last and least of her units; she 
must begin to do it now, without regard for what 
any other country does, else yield her singular, in- 
trinsic meaning in history. 

An interlocking measure, at once vital, is that 
America shall so re-order her remedial regimes that 
they will command the respect of all classes of 
offenders against the public law, and should enlist 
their voluntary cooperation in furtherance of the 
prosecution of those regimes. 

Going about so much to effect repair, America 
must make it understood that reformative results 
are to be gained, in the grand average, only by 
ways and means employed to build a going busi- 



264 Stop Thief 

ness ; that little more of sentiment is ordinarily use- 
ful in rightly-ordered reform endeavor, than that 
with which a big-hearted business man binds his 
employees to him and to honest industry ; that there 
is nothing hidden or esoteric about it : nothing above 
the level of earth, nor beyond the reach of average 
intelligence; and that, above all, magic wand of 
rehabilitation is not available to man's hand. 

Much as the young thoroughbred is trained and 
educated, while indulged, to a degree, as to his natu- 
ral reactions during the process, must the by-choice 
felon be handled; but always, as is the thorough- 
bred, to the ticking of the trainer's stop-watch. He 
must be prepared alike to go the route, and to re- 
spond to the whip hand of society. Even so, his is 
but the common lot. No man who is subject to the 
edicts of artificial law is, or can be, immune to the 
compulsory arm of his government. 

Because the basic exaction upon a would-be law- 
abiding man is to make an honest living, it follows 
logically that the fundamental activities of a reform 
plant should be mainly bread-winning activities. 

Furthermore, since the time allotted for trades 
teaching in correctional institutions is usually as 
one to three compared with the time required to 
build to a journeyman's skill in free life, it is im- 
perative that prison trades teaching, along with re- 
lated reformative processes, be sped up to the rea- 
sonable limit, under close mental and physical con- 



Tempting and Tagging to Criminality 265 

centration. Gutter-bred chatter won't do; hilarity- 
charged malingering is poison to the product. 

Beyond doubt, the system of training must be 
purged of anti-social by-products, such, for particu- 
lar example, as grossly overdone sporting features, 
with the mark for emulation set at the blood-spilling 
bruiser. 

Then insist that being a reform agent is a pro- 
foundly serious business, demanding specific skill, a 
wholesome tongue, and clearly expressed determina- 
tion to pull everywhere, all of the time, with good 
suggestion and example, for reformation, and for 
that only. 

Then bow out the fetich-beridden bungler; feed, 
house and clothe prisoners as human beings should 
be fed, housed and clothed; keep their bodies clean, 
and their souls stimulated through lending spiritual 
aid that does not intrude, but does engender con- 
sideration of root values ; and then the true criminal 
will be "given a chance" to cherish hope, while re- 
building fVom those values. 



CHAPTER Vm 

CONSTRUCTIVE RECOMMENDATIONS 

First and foremost, renewed efforts must be 
pressed for probation of, and restitution in kind by, 
first-offending young felons. This, to the end that 
they shall be given a decent chance to amend, while 
they are kept clear, to the last cleavage, of perni- 
cious suggestion and example which always pass in 
the criminal crowd; and that, with due regard for 
all conditions which obtain. To visit money and 
time imposts of the Shylock brand upon a first- 
offending lad who is far from unfolded, is to take 
the heart out of him during the probation period. 
Such method is to step him along too lively who 
goes bang up against the law of opposites while 
he is paying for a dead horse. It is also to set his 
jaws against society for having brutally stigmatized 
him, shall society lightly have passed prison sen- 
tence upon him. 

Then see to it that they who elect to be, and re- 
main, predal parasites are kept segregated while 
required to give of real service for their care and 
upkeep. See that they do it under the plainest of 
nutritious food without stint, and in the plainest 

266 



Constructive RecoTrtendation 267 

of garb without stripe, until they shall have given 
evidence fairly presumptive of their will to guide on 
the good. Do all without suspicion of partiality if 
you would make any part of it count. 

To temporize with a social pariah who flouts every 
function of collective government, while he smites 
the individual hand given over to serve him, is to 
play to his false cards and to part company with 
common sense. In such instance the unit is negli- 
gible, compared with the harm he will do if he is 
fed up purblindly with ill-timed sentiment, the which 
merciless habit motives him to euchre. 

Society may be shriven, measurably, of respon- 
sibility for the criminal who is mostly home-bred; 
but by the very fact of his being at large, society 
earns the confirmed social Hun who spurns the soft 
pedal and stabs society advisedly, day in and out. 

So, at the one end to stay the too harsh hand 
of compulsion, and at the other end to strike hard 
with isolation, are two ways by which to afford the 
circumstantial felon a fair chance for his social taw. 
In any case, the first duty of society is to see to it 
that it does not elbow a lad into confirmed crimi- 
nality. A dash of the Saviour in man would have 
saved many a one the degradation of a prison sen- 
tence. 

The only way to assure the most of remedial influ- 
ence to a correctional plant is to assure its com- 
pletely autonomous character. That can be done 



268 Stop Thief 

only through as careful classification of the plant 
as of the law-breaker; and that can not be done 
where each separate activity of the plant crosses 
every other activity of the plant. 

If it is to be a cottage-industrial system for likely 
lads who had nevertheless lapsed under probation, 
let it be precisely that with common schooling, and 
with all of puttering at farming and farm-garden- 
ing refused. If a family, farm-cottage scheme is 
designed for like lads likely circumstanced, let it be 
dedicated to intensive farming, dairying and garden- 
ing, save only for common schooling, the blacksmith 
shop, the greenhouse, and well-planned instruction 
in the use and care of machines and tools which every 
farmer should be able to handle with practical skill. 
In either instance, let fifteen minutes of setting-up 
drill, before breakfast, usher in the day's activities ; 
and give over each Saturday morning to close mili- 
tary training. The latter particularly in order to 
conserve disciplinary balance, and to assure orderly, 
systematic movement of the lads ; the former to pre- 
serve proper posture. 

When, as in the next logical step, it comes to a 
congregate system for those who had foozled while 
on probate parole, or parole from more favoring 
institutions, confine the activities strictly within en- 
closure to a trades-scholastic-military regime, ex- 
cepting where it is advisable to drive such as dairy- 
ing for purely local purposes. Even at that, estab- 



Constructive Recomefndation 269 

lish without the enclosure a family building which 
shall be outfitted to house and feed up-for-parole 
men assigned to outside work. 

There should be no commingling as between out- 
side and inside men. Graded schooling in the out- 
side building would not be practicable, but morning 
classes taught by higher-graded inmates while the 
sun is absorbing the dew would serve nicely for the 
something like sixty to ninety days previous to 
parole day for such inmates. Progressive privileges 
and perquisites should be within the winning of the 
men inside of the enclosure, but they should issue 
only to those who shall have worked to reasonable 
averages throughout the regime. Rational recrea- 
tion and amusement for all is presupposed, but 
naught of it should be allowed to lend slack to the 
outfitting of the lads to take care of themselves law- 
fully in free life. Here, we needs must re-ground 
our men in respect for the major voice; that, with 
regard for the individual case, and with as little of 
friction as may be, but not to the point where non- 
reformative compromise is struck solely to avoid 
friction. 

The prison prescription reaches in progressive 
sequence to the law-breaker who has run the gamut 
given with trimmings, or to the equivalent, yet 
cleaves to the crooked course. He must be taken 
seriously if the safety of the State is to be conserved. 
Still, since an erring soul should be given over grudg- 



270 Stop Thief 

ingly to disciplinary emphasis, the next, logical link 
in the chain, is an intermediate prison patterned 
after the trades-scholastic-military regime indicated 
in the preceding paragraph, — save that all lines 
should be lengthened and stiffened. Progressive priv- 
ileges for skilled prisoners nearing freedom should 
include work on the public highways, with the camp 
as a base. Actual knowledge of road-building is 
valuable knowledge. 

Internal government throughout should function 
for an industrial drive; this, under a kindly firmness 
by State agents. We now deal with men who have 
one leg in the pit, by which very fact we can not 
play at child's play if we are to help lift them to 
solid social ground. 

The sentence to this institution should be definite 
— indefinite; usually not less than two years mini- 
mum, with an indefinite maximum decided by the all- 
around progress of the prisoner. 

The prison of last resort (convict) should be run 
truly to its name; yet not even here should society 
visit heaping reprisal upon human pawns. On the 
other hand, not the least of compromise with crim- 
inousness should pass in a population singularly 
charged with the wolf in man, expressed in free life. 
Punitive measures defeat themselves which further 
degrade degenerated and degenerating men. By 
every method drawn to comprehensive understand- 
ing of the pressing needs of perverse humans heavily 



Constructive Recom^idation 271 

handicapped by nature, must we bear with and en- 
dure for them; but duty alike to the State and to 
them demands, for them, a prison regime which shall 
refuse selections of the kind responsible for their 
segregation as habitual criminals. For strict dis- 
cipline, and body-building exercises prosecuted to 
their beneficent ends, and for the closest mental and 
physical application at work, not the slightest apol- 
ogy should be offered. Such as closely-applied en- 
deavor, order, system, neatness, cleanliness, ready 
obedience, respect for authority, and consideration 
for the rights of fellows should obtain, as a matter 
of course. 

The particular wheel within this prison wheel 
should be a building completely appointed for isola- 
tion of persistently refractory units, whom to isolate 
proves to be the only rational choice left the State. 
This building should be built outward from the wall 
farthest removed from the main building; traffic as 
between it and the body of the plant should be 
restricted to the last, necessary step, and the iso- 
lated section of it should be made practically sound- 
proof. 

Habitual criminals who plan a continuous per- 
formance of mock-bravadoism before massed crim- 
inals feed on the approval of that expression by an 
appreciable percentage of the mass; hence, to de- 
prive the mock-bravado of an audience is at once 
to remove the main motive for his brutish bungling 



272 Stop Thief 

and hyenaized conduct to a sphere where it can not, 
by the weight of mass psychology, stampede the bet- 
ter-inclined majority. 

Prisoners of the kidney indicated should be kept 
segregated under effective yet kindly discipline, and 
concentrated striving, — laundering for example, — 
until they shall have signified their intention to ad- 
just to the State's idea of it. However, the aim 
should be to reduce secondary cellular confinement 
to the irreducible minimum, and the same should 
hold as to restricted diet. Neither is reformative, 
while the one usually operates to establish the loung- 
ing self-violator, the other to confirm the churlish 
brute. Get a man interested in his work, instead of 
in a "line of criminous talk" ; that's the thing to do, 
and it can be done for any prisoner who has a spark 
of self-respect left. 

Under existing law, products of prison industry 
may not cross those of free labor in the open mar- 
ket. That proscription is reactive, short-sighted 
error, which organized labor may well reconsider 
from the economical standpoint alone, since the ulti- 
mate effect of it is to take about two dollars out of 
the pocket of labor for every dollar it puts in ; and 
that is to waive the larger question of social solidar- 
ity based on Christian ethics. In any case, there 
is no good reason why production and exchange of 
serviceable products as between State institutions 
should not be worked out to reciprocal benefits and 



Constructive Recomendation 273 

near balance in values; but that calls for strict 
classification of industries, — along with the institu- 
tion and the man. 

Closely-applied industry should be capitalized in 
prisons if for none other than distinctly to the pur- 
pose of dignifying industry in minds which had been 
trained on the counterview, and on practice analo- 
gous to that view. Wheresoever a formerly unskilled 
prisoner is led up to apply himself habitually with 
skill, he is savable, — all else being equal. In any case, 
suggest nothing to a prisoner, no matter what his 
adjudged mental content, that crosses the supposi- 
tion that he can "make good, 55 if he wills to do so. 

First-class record men for whom discharge is in 
sight should be employed at public work provided, — 
machinery for the apprehension of elopers is made 
practically unbeatable, and the guards are live and 
supremely tactful. 

Even at this last plant of penal resort, proscrip- 
tions as against reasonable reactions should be 
avoided religiously. Such as lock-stepping, folding 
of arms, and forbidding prisoners a glance at vis- 
itors, set the teeth more firmly of men whose anti- 
social jaws we shall unlock, — if yet we can do that 
big thing, — through humane application of meas- 
ures whose necessary restrictions and deprivations 
are sufficiently drastic. "Enough is a feast, 55 any- 
where, any time. Appeal to reason is never wholly 
lost on sane prisoners of any grade ; whereas to 



274 Stop Thief 

visit petty penalties on natural, harmless, human 
expression ofttimes motivates reprisal out of all of 
proportion to such trivial imposts. 

Three good working rules for a prison officer are : 
(1) Discipline the mental twist which has it that 
appreciable of the oblique casts of prisoners are 
directed at you, personally; a few flings may be so 
aimed, but the bulk of them will be fired at bigger 
game. (2) Don't threaten; do what must be done 
like a decent father does do it. (3) Before resort- 
ing to a measure which will add to the prisoner's 
prison days, and after having weighed all circum- 
stances bearing on a given case, put it to yourself: 
Positions reversed, how would you like to have done 
to you that which you are about to do to the pris- 
oner? Thereof, the best of men will be driven, hard ; 
just the same, it is up to them not to yield of ex- 
ample. 

While all prison officers should be picked men paid 
liberally by right of their natural adaptability to 
and training for a most scientific work, the citizen 
staff of a convict prison should be the pick of the 
picked. It is like unto pastime for past masters at 
all the prison tricks of their trade to overreach 
the misplaced tyro. Such an one can and will stir 
up more deviltry in an hour of floundering than the 
house disciplinarian can reach and arrest in a 
month. '% 

Schooling for officers should begin at State "Crim- 



Constructive Recortppdatiow 275 

inological Schools"; and grade up, through State 
"Houses of Reception," to correctional schools for 
juveniles, to reformatories, to intermediate prisons, 
to convict prisons. Thereby officers would be en- 
abled to observe, study and allow for the boy in the 
man or the man in the boy, as the case might be; 
they could and should the better prime their methods 
for reformative shots at the progressive criminal; 
and full cognizance of the criminal's successive steps 
should lend strength to those methods. 

Successive promotion for officers, with added pay 
at each up-going step, should ensue upon Civil Serv- 
ice examinations so timed as to maintain waiting 
lists. Examinations should disclose the constantly 
enlarging capacity, both practical and theoretical, 
of the examined for the work. 

Failure by an officer to meet the reasonable exac- 
tions of an examination should leave him as then 
placed to dig for a broader understanding; and a 
plainly-expressed disposition on the part of a State 
penal agent to stick in an indifferent rut should be 
deemed sufficient cause to exclude him from the serv- 
ice. 

Whether an officer can not or will not grow in 
the work is one in result; in either instance, he will 
be a drag upon it, and many too many do not grow. 
That does not do now, and it will do the less and 
less as world-wide transitional conditions unfold; 
conditions which are intimately associated with 



276 Stop Thief 

crime, which are the most varied and far-reaching, 
and the social balance as between which will be the 
most easily disturbed of any in the world's history. 
The cardinal duty of society is to make the average 
correctional plant safe, as it is not now, to treat 
the criminal made and in the making; and the first 
step thereof will be to assure the calibre and quality 
of the personnel of reform staffs. 

A nation that gives in millions of tons of food 
for needy peoples will build humanely for its own 
unfortunates if it is shown how to build; but since 
the public purse will be pinched for at least a gen- 
eration to come, the beginning will be made judi- 
ciously with Houses of Reception for first-offending 
felons waiting trial. The first of such houses should 
be located close to capital cities; this, for reasons 
so palpable as to make detailed specification un- 
necessary. 

Even in such detention houses, intended to do 
away with the abominable jail system as far as may 
be, ways and means for industrial application should 
be thought out to agree with local exactions, classi- 
fication by cell blocks made, and conversation lim- 
ited to recreation hours on the common parade, 
which recreation should be taken successively by the 
groups as classified. Setting-up drill, followed by 
instruction in the school of the soldier and squad, 
should be vigorously prosecuted. Right here and 



Constructive Recomemdation 277 

now we want to start our lads in obeying orders, 
and in keeping their tongues between their teeth, 
where promiscuous talking won't do. 

Other than as specified roughly, the leisure life 
should be religiously single-cell life. It is high time 
for our man to ruminate and to do it free of objec- 
tive check; also, he should be placed safe objectively 
from perverse sexual attack; and also, the reten- 
tion atmosphere in which he moves should sober him 
by being exactly the reverse of that of the average 
jail, where to eat, lounge, play cards, and "put up" 
a crime-breeding "argument" pretty nearly rounds 
out the daily life. Choice of carefully selected indi- 
vidual games, and from a reasonably selective library 
made up of sound fiction, history, and current trade 
journals, would break the monotony of his unoccu- 
pied waking hours. 

In the meantime, jail life for the "jailbird" 
rounder should be made onerous enough to motive 
him to make an honest living rather than endure that 
life. Worse than it mostly is at present it could not 
be, which is to say: worse than fattening social 
drones at the public expense in hives where they are 
furnished the last formula for their malingering 
instincts. 

For some, work on local improvements would 
serve, under the auxiliary supervision of a jail guard. 
For others, a stockaded county farm with the labor 



278 Stop Thief 

throttle pulled wide open would be better. And for 
refractory units among them to be amenable by law 
to transfer to intermediate industrial prisons, there 
to massage floors pending their amended disposition 
to do and be, might initiate the social reclamation 
of many a bald bum and beat. In the event of such 
transfer, the original sentence should redate from 
the day of transfer; moreover, for the numerous of 
the class of habitual hangabouts who manage to 
duck the penal code while they refuse to lift a finger 
in their own behalf, the sentence under transfer 
should further amerce to a fine provisional upon 
the manner in which they react to the correctional 
measure of the industrial, prison plant. That would 
mean practically an indefinite sentence, and it should 
be so, since the persistent drone-bum is a dead weight 
which the taxpayer is fully justified in declining to 
carry. 

The primary reformatories of America are admir- 
ably appointed and conducted in the main. We lead 
the world now in first institutional aid for juvenile 
offenders, and when we shall have better understood 
the intrinsic bearing of Loyola's related words, "Let 
me train a child up through his seventh year, and 
I don't care who trains him after that," we should 
do so distinctively. As it is, the temptation to pluck 
a crime-tainted lad for parole before he is ripe for 
it, sums to serious and easily-corrected error. For 
one thing, we must rightly evaluate the pleas of that 



Constructive RecomWndation 279 

class of parents who can not rest until they get their 
children into reform schools, and then can not rest 
unless they make every effort to get them out. 

Of course the initial emphasis is on Child Proba- 
tion Courts, whereof we excel. However, probation 
for the offending child is one big thing which leaves 
much to be worked out, and which calls for under- 
agents who are given to know intuitively what to 
do for wrongly pointed kids. First of all, the con- 
sciences should be quickened of parents who seek to 
shift responsibility to the State for the up-bringing 
of their children. 

As it stands, probation powers that have the say- 
so practically hold officers of reform institutions 
taboo for service as probation officers. That inter- 
diction is gratuitous, ill-grounded, short-sighted dis- 
crimination against a class of men, the bulk of whom 
do earnestly and well, in a disease-charged atmos- 
phere, a confining work that calls for personal 
adjustment to the exactions of constantly changing 
men and conditions. Of reflexive discipline overdone 
must be admitted "Old Guard" advocates whose re- 
actionary influence would be more reprehensible, did 
it not counterbalance tomfoolery subversive of any 
kind of discipline. But if there is a reform school 
in the United States which does not elect to demand 
of its officers exactly the kind of service that fits 
them to make excellent probation officers, the super- 
intendent of that institution mismanages. 



280 Stop Thief 

Men like Chief Justice Harry Olson of Chicago, 
HI., Judge Ben B. Lindsey of Denver, Colo., and 
Judge Stevens of Rochester, N. Y., amplify the cor- 
rect meaning and intent of probation; men who 
realize that it is not so much what you do for a lad, 
as how you do it; who do not allow the heart's 
desire to veil the mind's eye while they so express 
themselves, and who are therefore of the Saviour's 
very own in the work. 

On the other hand, ill-timed, placed and managed 
suspension and probation sums to one of the present 
cardinal factors in the commission of crime in 
America. 

America's fateful hour is striking. Day by day 
the issue is the more distinctly drawn as between 
the law-abiding and those who would lock arms with 
legal chaos. The instinctive law-breaker always falls 
in step with the lawless mob, which he elects to in- 
flame for the last ferocity. He, first of all, must 
be stopped; in free life, if needs be, through facing 
him pistol to pistol; in prison life, by making the 
number of his prison days contingent upon the man- 
ner in which he seconds remedial measures planned 
and prosecuted for his social regeneration. 

As to correctional offices in toto, Pope's couplet 
should be, where and when it is not, arresting: 

"For forms of government let fools contest ; 
That which is best administered, is best." 



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